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WUNDERGROUND:

Providence, 1995 to the present

Wunderground: Providence, 1995 to the present

An exhibition in two parts:

Providence Poster Art, 1995 - 2005
Shangri-la-la-land

September 15, 2006 - January 7, 2007

Support for this exhibition has been provided by the Providence Tourism Council,
Paula and Leonard Granoff, and an anonymous donor
Media sponsor: The Providence Phoenix

Published by The RISD Museum in association with:

Gingko Press, Inc.

5768 Paradise Drive, Suite J

Corte Madera, CA 94925, USA

Phone (415) 924 9615 / Fax (415) 924 9608

email: books@gingkopress.com

www.gingkopress.com

ISBN: 1-58423-262-5
ISBN 13:978-1-58423-262-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2006931669

Photography of objects and Wunderground installation by Erik Gould,

Staff Photographer, The RISD Museum; additional photography by
Nadav Benjamin, Hisham Akira Bharoocha, Erik Bright, Xander Marro,

Frank Mullin, and Adam Wallacavage

Edited by Judith A. Singsen, Publications Coordinator, The RISD Museum

Creative direction by Helene Silverman
and Dan Nadel for PictureBox, Inc.
www.pictureboxinc.com

Printed by Westcan Printing Group, Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada

Front cover: Halloween party, Pink Rabbit, Olneyville (Providence), ca. 2003.
Photo by Nadav Benjamin

Back cover: Olneyville (Providence), 2006. Photo by Frank Mullin

WUNDERGROUND:

Providence, 1995 to the present

PROVIDENCE POSTER ART, 1995-2005

Irian

Judith Tannenbaum
with Maya Allison

Creative direction for catalogue by Helene Silverman
and Dan Nadel for PictureBox, Inc.

Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design
Providence, Rhode Island

Catalogue Contributors

Lenders to the Exhibition

Preface and Acknowledgments

Anonymous

Hope Alswang, Director , The RISD Museum

Anonymouseferatu
Sara Agniel

Foreword

Alex Barton

Gary Panter, Artist

Jenine Bressner
Mat Brinkman

Essays

Lee Buford

Sara Agniel, Gallery Agniel, Providence

Neil Burke/Monoroid

Judith Tannenbaum, The RISD Museum

Brian Chippendale
Jo Dery

Interview

Dirt Palace

Judith Tannenbaum and

Jamie Drake

Sasha Wiseman

James Hird Draper
Dave Fischer

Reminiscences

Julian Forgue

Bob Arellano

Leslie Friedman

Hanna Fushihara Aron

Michael K. Gaughan

Rob Coggeshall

Peter Glantz

Cybele Collins

Leif Goldberg

Dave Fischer

Shawn Greenlee

Lu Heintz

Mike Guadagni

Ben McOsker

James Brayton Hall

Rene Morales

Johnny Kardash III

Matt Obert

Scott Langlais

Carly Ptak

Ryan Lesser

Doug Singsen

Dave Lifrieri

Meredith Stern

John Lusi

Mike Taylor

Xander Marro

Sasha Wiseman

Beatrice McGeoch

Ben McOsker and Laura Mullen

Jenny Nichols

Matt Obert

John Riedel

Erin Rosenthal

Mike Taylor

Alec Thibodeau

Sasha Wiseman

A Note on the Exhibition and Catalogue

Wunderground consists of two parts, representing present and past of the Providence
underground art scene: Shangri-la-la-land and Providence Poster Art, 1995-2005 . Shangri-
la-la-land is a sculptural installation created especially for the Museum’s soaring Main Gallery.
It was conceived by a core group of eight artists who have lived and worked in the Olney ville
section of Providence: Mat Brinkman, Brian Chippendale, Jim Drain, Leif Goldberg, Jungil
Hong, Xander Marro, Erin Rosenthal, and Pippi Zornoza. In the adjacent Granoff Galleries,
Providence Poster Art, 1995-2005 presents a floor-to-ceiling display of over two thousand
handmade posters produced by more than a hundred and fifty artists to advertise rock shows,
art exhibitions, and community events held in Providence during the last decade.

Every effort has been made to identify accurately the artists who produced these
posters and the subjects of the documentary photographs. We apologize for any omissions or
errors that we may have made.

Dimensions are given in inches; height precedes width. We have assigned “titles” to
the posters for identification purposes, largely based on their “headlines,” usually using the
first individual or group named in the work.

Acknowledgments

Hope Alswang

Director, The RISD Museum

Seldom has an exhibition at The RISD Museum brought together so many of the ideas that are central to the
identity of this institution. These young artists working here in Providence are exploring expressive ways of
creating visual language that is at once intense, playful, dense, and iconoclastic. They care about making a
place where community matters and where artistic concerns are not driven by the marketplace.

In a time when art has become big business, this alternative vision is particularly important. It is
refreshing to see a cooperative spirit of shared endeavor, which makes the work in Wunderground so compel-
ling. We all respect the variety of ways in which these artists express themselves and the remarkable melding
of so many techniques. The Wunderground exhibition and this publication review ten years of these artists’
work, and we look forward to their ongoing contributions in the years to come.

I hope that this exhibition and others that follow will lay to rest the idea that museums, and particularly
The RISD Museum, are monuments to long-dead artists and vanished cultures. While we will always cherish
the past, we also embrace the present and approach the future with anticipation and curiosity. We celebrate
the Wunderground artists and the innovative, industrious, and beautiful spirit of this exhibition.

I wish to thank Judith Tannenbaum, Richard Brown Baker Curator of Contemporary Art, for bring-
ing Wunderground to the Museum and for her passion and commitment to work by artists of every possible
persuasion. Maya Allison, Curatorial Assistant in the Department of Contemporary Art, has worked with
Judith on all aspects of the project. Her research, diplomacy, and technical skills have been critical to organiz-
ing both of the exhibitions and this catalogue. Many other staff members have made important contributions
to Wunderground . Museum Registrar Tara Emsley managed the responsibility of tracking and caring for over
two thousand artworks with great equanimity and arranged for transportation of large-scale sculptural instal-
lations commissioned for the show. Stephen Wing, Manager of Museum Installation, often anticipated the
needs of the artists and curator, coming up with creative solutions for presenting the work and using the gal-
lery spaces to best advantage. The installation crew met the demands of a complex exhibition with customary
expertise and good humor. Linda Catano, Paper Preservation Specialist, figured out the best ways to protect
and install the myriad of posters. Matthew Montgomery, Director of Museum Marketing and Membership,
dedicated himself to getting the word out and garnering support far and wide. Glenn Stinson, Museum
Finance Manager, was resourceful and supportive on many fronts. Our Education Department — including
Ray Williams, Deborah Clemons, Marianne Ruggiero, Carole Villucci, and Deborah Wilde — has developed
an ambitious menu of programs to serve visitors of all ages. In addition, Pam Kimel and Frederica
McLaughlin have organized a variety of special events.

This publication also relied on the talents of many. We are grateful to Dan Nadel of PictureBox, Inc.,
and Helene Silverman for the ingenuity of their lively design and its appropriateness to the style and content
of the material represented. Sara Agniel has generously shared her firsthand knowledge of Olney ville art
and artists in her engaging and insightful essay. Gary Panter’s foreword, together with the reminiscences of
fourteen other contributing writers, adds a wonderfully personal tone to the mix. Judith Singsen, Museum
Publications Coordinator, edited the catalogue with great sensitivity and attention to detail. Erik Gould,
Museum Photographer, and Denise Bastien, Collection Information Specialist, skillfully photographed the
artworks and produced their images. Nadav Benjamin, Hisham Akira Bharoocha, and Erik Bright gener-
ously provided a variety of historic installation views.

We are indebted to the many lenders to the exhibition, who had the foresight to collect and save the
fascinating but ephemeral posters presented in this exhibition. Their willingness to share these with our
public is greatly appreciated. It ensures that the history of this influential movement will be preserved for
generations to come. The commitment of Sasha Wiseman, who searched out the huge number of posters,
flyers, and handbills exhibited here, set up a comprehensive database, and served as a liaison to the
Olneyville art community, was critical to the success of the project.

We are grateful to the Providence Tourism Council for its generous support of the Wunderground
exhibition and to our media sponsor, The Providence Phoenix.

Finally, our profound thanks to the core group of eight artists — Mat Brinkman, Brian Chippendale,
Jim Drain, Leif Goldberg, Jungil Hong, Xander Marro, Erin Rosenthal, and Pippi Zornoza — who have
created Wunderground for us. Not only have they dedicated great energy and enthusiasm to realizing new
work for this exhibition, but they have also enabled us to showcase the activities and images produced by a
vibrant, much larger community of artists. Their unfettered spirit is evident far and wide.

Foreword

Gary Panter

Artist

The fifties was in black and white. There was always some guy on the radio shouting in an authoritative monotone.
Everyone wore suits and smelled like pomade. Shoes were shiny. It was like the “Blue Meanies” had taken all the
color away and locked it down tight.

In the sixties the hippies brought the color back to humankind and made a lot of noise about moving into the
future willingly; adapting, evolving, becoming new advanced humans living in Bucky Fuller’s domes in space or in
Archigram crawling cities or Dickian Conapts decorated by Hapshash and Martin Sharp. We would be wearing air-
brushed, macramed, embroidered, flashy gear and be making the scene on our space bikes. Bravely exploring inner
and outer space. The new gods.

Then everybody got afraid of moving into the space domes— and inner space could be creepy if you didn’t watch
out— and so everybody moved to the country instead and watched Mary Tyler Moore on television. All the groovy
kids shed all those colors and got into granola and leather and big chunky earthshoes and southern rock. Where did
it all go wrong, Lord?

The punks were kind of grey ironic insincere killers of Pepperland, too. Energetic, but sometimes lacking color.
Then punk, which predicted NO FUTURE, lasted thirty years, and then finally, but not lastly, when you least ex-
pected it, along comes FORT THUNDER! ! ! SPACE HIPPIES IN ARCHIGRAM CRAWLING CITIES once again.
WOOKIE YETI QUISP HOLODECK RAINBOW CRAWLING CITIES. CHECK IT OUT. BE THERE OR BE
SQUARE!

We were talking about a love we all could share.

If we find it, to try our best to keep it there. . .

With our LOVE....

Gary Panter is a painter ; printmaker, cartoonist , puppet-maker ; light-show artist , and occasional musician. He earned
a degree in painting from East Texas State University at Commerce in 1974. The son of a Native American painter of
Western subjects, Gary has been making art since childhood.

The Artists

Mat Brinkman (American, b. 1973), a former RISD student (Printmaking, 1991-93, Sculpture 1995-96, then was
held back and dropped out for a second time) and co-founder of Fort Thunder, is a comic and poster artist, filmmaker (thanks
to Xander Marro), and noise muss-ician. He is the co-founder (with Leif Goldberg in 2000) of Paper Rodeo , a free comics
newspaper/anthology in which his serial “Multi-Force” is published. Teratoid Heights , a compilation of his early comics, was
published by Highwater Books in 2003. Mat’s bands include Mindflayer and work with Forcefield. A few of his aliases are Mr.
Brinkman, Mystery B, and Brinkmangler.

Brian Chippendale (American, b. 1973 and a half) studied printmaking at RISD (1991-96), where he received a
failing grade in his Silkscreen II class. He is the drummer in the noise rock duo Lightning Bolt, which for a brief two months was
called Frog and Toad. Chippendale is a printmaker and comic artist whose work often reflects current political situations. He
was co-founded by Fort Thunder in 1995 and has been forced to reflect on that every year since. Lightning Bolt has toured inter-
nationally several times, recently being rejected by Japanese Immigration and held in the vicinity of Tokyo’s Narita International
Airport for two days before being sent back home with the advice that bands should apply for work visas when working abroad.
He has been evicted (in the name of both Progress and his personal safety) from two historic mills in Providence and apparently
is closing in on his third...

Jim Drain (American, b. 1975) graduated from RISD in 1998 with a BFA in sculpture. He is the 2005 recipient of the
Baloise prize, awarded by Art Basel (Switzerland), where his solo exhibition Statements was presented. Drain’s work is rooted
in knitting and textiles. His solo exhibition I Wish I Had a Break was presented at Greene Naftali Gallery in New York in 2005.

A former member of Forcefield, his work has been included in major group exhibitions nationally and internationally, including
the 2002 Whitney Biennial, Deitch Projects, and the Lyon Biennial. He lives and works in Miami, Florida.

Leif Goldberg (American, b. 1975) graduated from RISD’s film and animation program in 1997. Cartoonist, zine-
maker, filmmaker, and former member of the Fort Thunder art collective, he is the co-founder (with Mat Brinkman in 2000) of
the comic tabloid Paper Rodeo. In 2005, he edited and produced Free Radicals , a compilation of comics and drawings. He was
a member of the art, music, and performance collective Forcefield and a contributing writer/performer for the experimental
theater troupe, trutheatertheater.

JungilHong (American, b. Korea, 1976) received her BFA in ceramics from RISD in 1999. She has won Rhode Island
State Council on the Arts Fellowship Merit Awards in the Drawing, Printmaking, and 3D categories. Her work has been shown
at Gallery Agniel in Providence; New Image Art Gallery, West Hollywood; Space 1026, Philadelphia; International Print Center,
New York; the Cheongju Craft Museum, Cheongju, Korea; and the prestigious Marge’s Deli showroom in New Jersey. Current-
ly, she is nurturing an army of succulents, hoping they will hold the soil against the waves of luxury development.

Xander Marro (American, b. 1975) is described by the Providence Phoenix as “a puppet-maker and projectionist,
steeped in the underground.” She is a member of the Dirt Palace, a feminist art collective, where she makes movies, puppet
shows, prints, and phone calls. Her underground adventures include curating the long-running “Movies with Live Soundtracks”
series and touring with “Bird Songs of the Bauharoque,” a two-woman puppet operetta starring her alter-egos, Lady Longarms
and Madame von Temper Tantrum. She has of recent days gotten herself deep into the wild world of community organizing
around neighborhood social justice and human rights issues. She graduated from Brown University. Her mouth keeps getting
bigger.

Erin Rosenthal (American, b. 1976), originally from Providence, was raised on the Navajo Nation in New Mexico
and Arizona as a child. She holds a BFA in Film/Animation/Video from RISD (1998) and was a Fulbright Scholar in 2000-01
for film study at the Academy of Fine Arts Krakow, Poland. Rosenthal is a painter, printmaker, sculptor, and filmmaker. Theatri-
cal performances include Near Earth Object , a shadow-puppet odyssey in collaboration with Leif Goldberg, which toured the
U.S. in 2003, as well as the trutheatertheater productions Time Dies When You’re Fun Fun and Travel Light Light Keepers in
2003 and 2004. She is also a chanteuse and the drummer for the band urDog, which has toured Europe and the U.S. in 2005.
Recent art exhibitions include Dazzle Dogs at the Lizabeth Oliveria Gallery and 70 More Artists to Be Announced at New Image
Art Gallery, both in Los Angeles.

Pippi Zornoza (American, b. 1978) received a BFA in Printmaking from RISD in 2001. She is a co-founder of the Dirt
Palace, where she embroiders, makes lace, knits, carves, prints, and stitches to make everyday useful objects magical. In 2004,
her printmaking work was exhibited in Japan and was published in the art-poster anthology, The Art of Modern Rock. Her own
musical exploits have included the bands Bonedust, which toured the U.S. in 2006; Throne of Blood (2002-03); and Sawzall
(2001-02). Pippi is the star in the cult movie classic Die You Zombie Bastards , directed by Caleb Emerson. Her most recent
project is a deep collaboration with musician Chrissy Wolpert co-directing and co-producing an epic rock opera as Bonedust.
Pippi will star as Death.

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Eagle Square , 2000
Color screenprint, 40 x 25
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Barnyard Critters, n.d.
Color screenprint with spray paint, 13x13
Courtesy of Ben McOsker and Laura Mullen

Mat Brinkman
Fast Forward, 1994
Photocopy, 11x17
Courtesy of Brian Chippendale

Jim Drain

Wrestling at Fort Thunder, December 6, 1997
Color screenprint, 19 x 15 (irregular)
Courtesy of Brian Chippendale

Mat Brinkman

The Haters, August 4, 1 997

Color screenprint on graph paper, 10 diam.

Courtesy of Brian Chippendale

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Thirty, But Still Dirty...

Providence’s Freewheeling Art Scene

Judith Tannenbaum

Richard Brown Baker Curator of Contemporary Art,
The RISD Museum

six years ago, before I took my job at The RISD Museum in 2000, 1 heard
about a group of young artists living and working in Providence’s unfashion-
able and down-at-the-heels West Side. My colleague then at the Institute of
Contemporary Art (ICA) in Philadelphia, Alex Baker— considerably younger
and hipper than I— told me about the art/music/comics scene centered
around an old mill building dubbed Fort Thunder in the Olneyville section of
the city. Alex, who has a PhD in visual anthropology but grew up skate-board-
ing, introduced myself and ICA audiences to the world of artist-designed stick-
ers and a new generation of graffiti artists. He also told me about a new artists’
collective in Center City Philadelphia called Space 1026, started by several
artists who had close ties to Fort Thunder and RISD. When I moved to Rhode
Island, I was, therefore, on the lookout for this group of young Providence art-
ists who operated outside of commercial galleries and traditional art venues.

Not long after I came to work here, Fort Thunder and other mill build-
ings located at or near Eagle Square in Olneyville were frequently in the news,
their existence threatened by real-estate developers. Artists who had lived and
worked in these buildings since the mid-1990s joined forces with preserva-
tionists to save the structures and the neighborhood. Through Sara Agniel, a
young gallery owner, Brown alumna, activist, and entrepreneur, I attended a
number of meetings sponsored by the Providence Preservation Society in fall
2001 and met some of the artists involved in the cause. I also had the oppor-

FIGHT

to save

Jean Cozzens

Fight to Saue Eagie Square, Fall 2001
Color screenprint, 17x12
Courtesy of Sasha Wiseman

Jungil Hong

Olneyoille County Fair ; December 16, 2000
Spray paint, stencil, notebook page, 11x7
Courtesy of Brian Chippendale

tunity to visit the Fort twice before it was demolished in January 2002 to make way
for a supermarket and strip mall. I attended the Olneyville County Fair, an open
house and art sale that took place there in December 2000. Subsequently, I took
then Museum director Phillip Johnston and education head David Henry to the
Fort because I wanted them to experience the over-the-top, super-stuffed, raunchy
live/work/performance space that had organically taken shape over the previous
five or six years.

Brian Chippendale was our host and guide. He had founded Fort Thunder
in 1995 with Mat Brinkman when both were students at RISD. I remember be-
ing struck by the contrasts of clothing and style — Phillip in a dignified pinstripe
suit and Brian in his ragged, handmade, distinctly decorated garb — and by the
pungent smells emanating from an indoor compost pile and a kitty litter box that
may not have been changed (only added to) since the Fort was established. There
were a communal kitchen, studio for screenprinting, and a large performance/
practice space as well as a number of individual “rooms” that each resident artist
had carved out for himself. (Erin Rosenthal lived at the Fort for a year, otherwise
the group was overwhelmingly male.) It appeared that no surface remained un-
touched. Bicycles in various states of repair filled Peter Fuller’s space. Chippendale
had built a hutlike structure within the confines of his area and covered it with col-
orfully screenprinted newspaper. Sculptural elements, collaged images, and post-
ers hung from the walls and ceilings everywhere. Clearly, more was more.

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Mat Brinkman

Olneyuille County Fair, December 16, 2000
Spray paint, stencil, 17 x 11
Courtesy of Brian Chippendale

Polina Malikin

Olneyoille County Fair, December 20, 2003
Color screenprint, 18x12
Courtesy of Sasha Wiseman

I became familiar with a broader spectrum of Olneyville artists through
the Promassive print portfolio presenting the work of twenty-five artists,
which Agniel published and exhibited in 2002 to benefit the downtown-Provi-
dence art space AS220. She also organized several eye-opening exhibitions:
a series of shows mounted in vacant downtown-Providence storefronts on
Westminster Street in late 2001; Body of Work at a former funeral home on
Federal Hill a few blocks from Olneyville Square in October 2002 and March
2003; and another large group show held at Firehouse 13 off Broad Street in
South Providence in December 2002. On a national level, the art/music
group Forcefield, with roots in Fort Thunder, was represented at the 2002
Whitney Biennial exhibition by an installation entitled Third Annual Rogga-
bogga. The Forcefield artists— Brinkman, Jim Drain, Leif Goldberg, and Ara
Peterson— were identified only by their nutty pseudonyms: Meerk Puffy,
Gorgon Radeo, Le Geef, and Patootie Lobe. Forcefield was “discovered” by
Whitney curator Lawrence Rinder through a twenty-two-page article about
Fort Thunder that appeared in nest magazine in summer 2001. 1 Featured in
the “tribal” section of the Biennial, Forcefield’s wallpapered room was filled
with a group of figures (some dressed in vivid knitted costumes), strange un-
predictable sounds, and psychedelic video projections. It garnered consider-
able critical attention, underscored by articles in the New York Times and Art-
forum , among others. The group split up shortly after the exhibition. As a result
of the Whitney exposure, two of the artists, Drain and Peterson, have shown
in New York, Miami, and elsewhere, both individually and collaboratively, 2
whereas Brinkman and Goldberg have preferred to stay away from the art
worlds fast track. Nevertheless, they have developed an international fan
base, particularly for their published comics. 3

I also attended exhibitions and events at the Hive, a feminist collective
founded in 2000, to some degree in response to the male dominance of Fort
Thunder and other spaces. In 2001, the organization split. Several of the
founding artists, including Jo Dery, Xander Marro, and Pippi Zornoza, stayed
in the original Hive building on Olneyville Square and formed the Dirt Palace,
which today is home base and work space for seven artists. In a spirit of equali-
ty, independence, and activism reminiscent of the women’s movement during
the 1970s, members honed their carpentry skills and renovated the building
themselves. In 2003, the nonprofit Hive Archive bought a building at another
location in Olneyville. It plans to provide affordable studios and a gallery/per-
formance space as well as to promote social change.

Fast forward a few years. In anticipation of closing the Museum to fa-
cilitate construction of RISD’s Chace Center next door and renovation of the
existing Radeke Building, I thought it would be exciting to offer some of the
Olneyville artists use of our galleries to create an exhibition. Knowing how ex-
cessive and unpredictable such a project might be, it seemed sensible to sched-
ule it immediately before construction. We would not have to bring the galler-
ies back to pristine condition immediately after the show, and the artists would
be able to work freely without worrying about the state of the walls, floors, and
ceilings. Creating an exhibition for a museum by artists who are so decided-
ly noninstitutional in their interests and approach would be a challenge. My
presentation about this project to Museum staff and incoming director Hope
Alswang in summer 2005 met with great enthusiasm. I felt from the beginning
that in order to embody the freewheeling spirit of Olneyville, the exhibition
should be driven by the artists themselves with myself and other Museum staff
serving as catalysts, facilitators, and collaborators.

I contacted Sara Agniel, asking her to serve informally as my sounding
board and to help in approaching artists with whom I felt an age and culture
gap. We came up with a list of eight prospective participants: Mat Brinkman,
Brian Chippendale, Jim Drain, Leif Goldberg, Jungil Hong, Xander Marro,
Erin Rosenthal, and Pippi Zornoza. All had graduated from RISD, or had
come close to graduating, between 1996 and 2001, except for Marro, who
graduated from Brown University in 1998, where she studied semiotics. The
RISD artists had studied printmaking, sculpture, film/video/animation, and
ceramics. All eight artists accepted our invitation to meet in October 2005,
and we’ve been off and running since then, getting together either at the
Museum, the Dirt Palace, or the Hilarious Attic, currently home and studio

Pippi Zornoza

But I'm Wearing a Thong , May 1 8, 2001
Color screenprint, 11 x 24
Courtesy of Julian Forgue

Ballroom, Dirt Palace, Olneyville (Providence), 2006. Photo by Xander Marro

Demolition of Eagle Square, Olneyville (Providence), January 2002. Photo by Erik Bright

space for Brinkman, Chippendale, and Hong. In between, there have been
many e-mail communications and phone calls.

Fairly early on, the eight artists decided that they wanted to bring to-
gether one of each poster, handbill, and flyer that had been produced and
circulated in Providence during the ten-year period from 1995 (the year Fort
Thunder was established) through 2005. These have turned out to total more
than two thousand items, mostly screenprinted, but also some photocopied
and unique pieces. It was decided that the posters were to be hung floor to
ceiling in three sequential galleries, grouped together by venue where the
featured event (music, art, film, community meeting, etc.) had occurred, and
arranged chronologically, as feasible. Well over two hundred sites are rep-
resented, some by only one poster, but around thirty by more than twenty
artworks each. Headset listening stations featuring live recordings from per-
formances at approximately fifteen primary sites would accompany the post-
ers on the walls. It was somewhat surprising, but gratifying, that these young
artists wished to see the history of their work and their community on the
Museum’s walls. The title of this show within the larger umbrella of Wunder-
ground is decidedly straightforward — Providence Poster Art, 1995-2005 —
in contrast to their more characteristically eccentric and inventive wordplay.

The artists also agreed that the show should be as inclusive and com-
plete as possible; thus, nothing was to be eliminated on the basis of aesthetic
judgments or state of preservation, although examples in good condition
were to be selected whenever possible. Some of the posters had been ripped
from kiosks or walls and saved, whereas others were purchased and never
actually used. More than one hundred and fifty artists have been identified
as makers of around sixteen hundred of the posters and handbills, whereas
over four hundred posters were produced by others who remain unknown
at this point. In a number of cases, more than one artist worked on a poster.
We have borrowed works from “collectors,” including a number of the artists
themselves; local restaurateur Julian Forgue; Ben McOsker, founder of Load
Records; and Museum guard John Riedel, among others. Some of the post-
ers were produced in several color ways and sizes ranging from large (35 x 23
inches or more ) to very small (3x4 inches).

After the project was underway, it was decided that the Museum was
not to close during construction after all, but instead would remain open to
the public throughout the building expansion and reinstallation. Still, Director
Alswang felt strongly that the show should go on as planned and that the art-
ists should be accorded as much freedom as possible to alter the space. These
concerns are particularly relevant to the other piece of the Wunderground
project, an installation entitled Shangri-la-la-land , loosely based on the idea of

Xander Marro, preliminary drawing for Wunderground: Shangri-la-la-land installation.
The RISD Museum, Providence, 2006. Photo by Xander Marro

Xander Marro, concept collage for Wunderground: Shangri-la-la-land installation.
The RISD Museum, Providence, 2006. Photo by Xander Marro

a village or community. Created specifically for the Museum’s soaring, skylit Main
Gallery with 2,200 square feet of floor space, the installation is composed of vari-
ous structures and incorporates a range of social, educational, and physical activi-
ties. Mat Brinkman, Brian Chippendale, Jim Drain, Leif Goldberg, Jungil Hong,
Xander Marro, Erin Rosenthal, and Pippi Zornoza have each conceived and con-
structed his/her own section of the space, but all have worked together to connect
the various parts into a total environment. There have been significant shifts and
changes along the way, and it is possible that parts of the project will continue to
take shape even after the show has opened to the public.

As of this writing, Brinkman is making a looming, fifteen-foot-tall “monster”
sculpture out of papier-mache, “a self-portrait” that will stand on the floor but will
be attached by cables to the gallery walls. Chippendale is constructing a house on
wheels (his “home on the run”), covered with colorfully patterned wallpaper, which
visitors may enter to hear music, read comics, and try on masks. Drain is building
a sculptural wall into which he is incorporating the Museum’s Northwest Coast to-
tem pole (ca. 1900), long isolated from other artwork in the Museum. Marro is de-
signing a platform featuring fantastically shaped towers with peepholes into which
visitors may peer. Zornoza, who is steeped in traditional craft practices, is creating a
sequence of carved wood and metal signs in collaboration with Lu Heintz and may
also produce homemade presents for visitors to the opening events. Rosenthal is
fabricating a mountain of tree limbs with video animations projected from its top,
illuminating “clouds” above. Hong is similarly interested in the possibilities of or-
ganic growth in the form of a large, suspended terrarium and possibly a cluster of
spheres that could be rolled around the gallery. Goldberg is building an enclosed,
macabre space featuring a sculptural screen, projected light, and color.

As a group, the artists have requested that the Main Gallery’s large skylight
be covered in order to darken the space, and they are configuring a path for visi-
tors to meander through the installation. Odds are that lights will be added to parts
of the show, various elements will be suspended from the ceiling and come off the
walls, and indescribable sounds will emanate from anywhere. Several other artists
have been asked by the Wunderground team to participate in bringing Shangri-la-
la-land to fruition. Components of the show have been constructed at an off-site
location rented for this purpose and then assembled and completed in the Main
Gallery, because most of the artists do not have enough space of their own to work
on the scale required for this project.

Wunderground required a leap of faith and trust on the part of both the
artists and the Museum. The artists expected that we had understood their values
and goals and would do our best to support their efforts and present their work
in keeping with their aesthetics as well as their politics. The Museum had to have
confidence that the artists would take full advantage of this commission to create
new work, provide information as needed, and be sensitive to the responsibilities
of a public institution to its audience, particularly in terms of physical safety. With
this particular project, the Museum aims to make its audience more aware of the
wealth of young talent living in the region, to provide an enlivening and provoca-
tive experience for viewers, and to encourage experimental, nontraditional art
activity. We also hope that the show generates new insights nationally about con-
temporary art-making.

Is it possible to describe or agree upon what is unique about the Providence
art scene over the past decade? Even more difficult, is it possible to predict where
it will go from here? For the core group of eight artists featured in Wunderground ,
several shared values stand out. Their art and their life-styles are inseparable.
Their work is remarkably handmade and low-tech, which is unusual in an age of
constantly emerging new technologies. They frequently collaborate with one an-
other and with other artists, although they also work independently. Each artist
draws upon more than one medium or discipline: sculpture, printmaking, film/
video/animation, rock music, comics, puppet theater, and more. They often re-
cycle found materials in their artwork, clothing, and living spaces. They believe in
living inexpensively, in working to support themselves and their music and art, but
without interest in moving up the economic ladder. As Tom Spurgeon has written:
The Providence group has achieved importance not just for the sum total
of its considerable artists, but also for its collective impact and its value as
a symbol of unfettered artistic expression.. ..It was a group of artists, many
of whom pursued comics among other kinds of media, who lived together
and shared the same workspaces. As an outgrowth of Rhode Island School
of Design [RISD] where nearly all of them attended (some even graduating),

Fort Thunder provided a common setting for creation that imposed almost
no economic imperative to conform to commercial standards or to change
in an attempt to catch the next big wave. They were young, rents were
cheap, and incidental money could be had by dipping into other more com-
mercial areas of artistic enterprise such as silk-screening rock posters. Fort
Thunder was also fairly isolated both in terms of influences that breached
its walls and how that work was released to the outside world. This allowed
its artists to produce a significant body of work that most people have yet to
see. It also fueled the group’s lasting mystique . 4

Native American, Northwest Coast, Totem Pole, ca. 1900,

red cedar, paint, 12' h. Gift of the R. F. Haffenreffer Family Foundation,

Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence

The trend of young artists working collectively seems to have increased sig-
nificantly during the past five to ten years, with the Providence scene serving as
inspiration for group activities and artist-run spaces around the country. 5 Artists
may be drawn together by a common political activist stance or by shared aes-
thetic interests or both. According to Holland Cotter:

One way or another, joint production among parties of equal standing . . .
scrambles existing aesthetic formulas. It may undermine the cult of the art-
ist as media star, dislodge the supremacy of the precious object and unset-
tle the economic structures that make the art world a mirror image of the
inequities of American culture at large. In short, it confuses how we think
about art and assign value to it. This can only be good. 6
In Providence, groups spawn other groups that may co-exist and overlap, and the
process is organic rather than premeditated or intentional.

Also, in Providence as elsewhere, artists move into inexpensive, run-down,
marginal areas. They revitalize these neighborhoods; but when the real-estate
market skyrockets, the artists are priced out unless they had the foresight and cash
to buy early on. This scenario is not unique here — it has happened before in the
transformation of Manhattan’s SoHo in the 1970s, and more recently in Williams-
burg and other sections of Brooklyn, as well in other cities around the country.
Based on currently surging redevelopment of Providence’s old mill buildings into
middle- and high-income housing and commercial spaces, warehouse loft-living
is no longer an option here. Consequently, a number of artists have relocated to
small houses in the past few years. Ambitious plans by developers (not based in
Rhode Island) for Providence’s West Side — Olneyville and adjacent areas — are
forcing artists out. For example, the building that currently houses the Hilarious
Attic must be vacated by the artists who rent space there by the end of 2006.

What may be different here is that artists have not settled in Providence
in order to “make it” onto center stage, as they do in New York. More RISD and
Brown students and graduates chose to stay here in the 1990s and today than pre-
viously. Other individuals have moved here from Boston and places farther away
because they want to stay under the radar. In Providence they can create their
own spaces to show work and perform rather than seeking gallery representa-
tion or commercial recording contracts. (Several important independent record
labels are based here.) They have launched their own publications, printed by
themselves and given away or priced very cheaply, instead of relying on existing
art presses or publishers.

In light of greater public recognition, as well as the impact of the City of
Providence’s “renaissance” and real-estate boom, will the Fort Thunder genera-
tion be able to stay true to their ideals and maintain their counter-culture indepen-
dent art/life style? These Olneyville artists, who have already or are about to turn
thirty, are currently involved in grass-roots political action, a sequel to the demoli-
tion of Fort Thunder. They are trying desperately to maintain the economic and
ethnic diversity of their neighborhood and to influence future development so that
affordable housing continues to exist. Let’s hope their voices are heard — for the
health of the artists and for the health of our city. V

1 Lois Maffeo, "Fort Thunder," nest magazine (Summer 2001), pp. 134-55.

2 Drain and Peterson have collaborated on major installations at the Moore Space in Miami,
Deitch Projects in New York, and the Lyon Biennial. Drain, who is represented by Greene Naftali
in New York, was awarded the prestigious Baloise Prize at Art Basel in 2005. Peterson recently
had an exhibition at John Connelly Presents, New York.

3 In 2000, Brinkman and Goldberg started the influential Paper Rodeo, a free comics newspaper
inspired by Paper Radio, begun by Ben Jones and Christopher Forgues in 1998. Brinkman's book
Teratoid Heights was published by Highwater Books in May 2000/03. Ben Jones went on to
form the art collective Paper Rad with Jessica Ciocci and her brother Jacob. They authored the
book Paper Rad, BJ. 8c da Dogs, published by Picturebox, Inc., in 2005. Also in 2005, Goldberg
edited and produced Free Radicals , which includes submissions by persons in prison elicited
nationally by Goldberg, as well as by other readers and regular contributors to the zine.

4 Tom Spurgeon, "Fort Thunder Forever," in The Comics Journal (October 2003), p. 59.

5 Among current spaces are Milhaus, Milwaukee; Dos Pestaneos, Atlanta; Lump Gallery,

Raleigh; Your Face and Paragraph, Kansas City; and Space 1026, Philadelphia.

6 Holland Cotter, "The Collective Conscious," The Neu) York Times (March 5, 2006, Section 2);
includes a discussion of Otabenga Jones 8c Associates, Critical Art Ensemble, the Atlas Group,
and Reena Spaulings, among other collective ventures.

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Mat Brinkman

Melt Banana, October 14, 1998
Photocopy, 11 x 17
Courtesy of Brian Chippendale

Jim Drain
Sister Spit, July 30, 1998
Color screenprint, 18x12
Courtesy of Brian Chippendale

Mat Brinkman

Fort Thunder at Space 1026, February 4, 2000
Color screenprint, 1 2 x 20
Courtesy of Brian Chippendale

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Julians, 1998
Color screenprint, 24 x 34
Courtesy of Ben McOsker and Laura Mullen

Amy Zimmitti

Tim Ogi/ee/ejanuary 29, 1999

Color screenprint with spray paint, 17x11

Courtesy of Brian Chippendale

Leif Goldberg
Spaceheads, July 14, 2000
Color screenprint, 19 x 13
Courtesy of Brian Chippendale

Leif Goldberg

USA Is A Monster, August 22, 2000
Color screenprint, 1 8 x 24
Courtesy of Brian Chippendale

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Lightning Bolt, April 27, 2000
Color photocopy, 18 x 23
Courtesy of Brian Chippendale

Mat Brinkman

Lightning Bolt/Force Field, 2000
Color screenprint, 1 0 x 26
Courtesy of Brian Chippendale

Nei! Burke and Sam McPheeters
Men's Recovery Project, 2000
Color screenprint, 17x11
Courtesy of Michael K. Gaughan

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WATERBED with CONCEPT &
the many tenacled splendor on
THURS. NOV.30th at SAFARI lounge

Unidentified artist
Waterbed, November 30, 2000
Color screenprint, 12x9
Courtesy of Mat Brinkman

Jim Drain

O.S.S. (Olneyville Sound System), November 10, 2000

Color screenprint, 14x11

Courtesy of Ben McOsker and Laura Mullen

Music practice space. Munch House, Olneyville (Providence), ca. 2003.
Photo by Nadav Benjamin

An Interview
with Sasha Wiseman

Conducted by Judith Tannenbaum
April 3, 2006

Mindflayer practicing, BULB Clubhouse, Providence, 2001.
Photo by Hisham Akira Bharoocha

Judith Tannenbaum: What do you think distinguishes the Providence look and sound from those of other places? Do you have any idea
what the posters looked like before this generation of artists?

Sasha Wiseman: Well, yeah. Before I was collecting posters, there was this explosion. There were posters in ’95 and ’96 and before that, but
they had solid graphic design. They had images and words, you could read them. The colors never ran into each other. There were color schemes.
That’s reflected in the earlier work of Mat Brinkman, people like that. They didn’t have any other role models, poster-wise. Now, when you see kids
starting out, they look Fort Thundery — the new norm for Providence.

So, part of what distinguished the new posters was that it was hard to read them? You had to try to figure out what it was they were advertising?

Yes. You had to be clever. It was kind of a game or treasure hunt. If there was a show in Olneyville and you didn’t know what loft space it was
at, and you weren’t connected enough to the people or maybe you were too shy to admit you didn’t know where it was, you would ride your bike
around and hopefully find other people riding their bikes who looked like they knew where they were going. You could just follow them. Some peo-
ple got really resentful of the secrecy and felt that it was very exclusive and cliquey. They would make posters for a public event, but it wasn’t really a
public event. That’s part of the fun of it.

But if anyone saw the posters, they could go to the event?

Oh, yeah, if they could figure it out. There wasn’t someone at the door telling them they were not cool enough to go to this.

But even if you saw the posters, you still had to rely on word of mouth to know what was happening?

Yes, I think that is what helped people feel like a community. It was practical; it wasn’t because they wanted to be exclusive. If you are going to
say, “Come to this show at this illegal venue,” you can’t have cops or whoever knowing exactly where things are. You want to make it hard enough to
keep away people who want to bust your show or venue.

How did all the other venues come to be?

That is a good question for someone who was around when it was happening. I know that there was Eagle Square with Fort Thunder, but there
were other buildings. Someone discovers a good thing. There’s tons of space, and it’s cheap, and people leave you alone. You can’t find something
on the East Side or near the colleges where you can have something with fireworks — all sorts of pyrotechnics. You could really just do anything,
and who doesn’t want to do just anything? Word of mouth spreads. People would move to Providence just to live in the loft community. I think that
is what the Oak and Troy Street buildings were about. People just filled up those buildings so quickly. Within a year, every one of those spaces in
those buildings was rented. People went there and had a purpose. They wanted to live somewhere and have shows and do art.

How old are you now?

I’m 19. It’s like this funny third wave or something. There were the people who started Fort Thunder and Dirt Palace; and then people who are
five years younger than them; and then we are five years younger still.

Are other younger people actively making art and music now?

Mat Brinkman
Karp, November 7, 1995
Color screenprint, 18 x 12
Courtesy of Brian Chippendale

Mat Brinkman
Doo Rag, April 14, 2006
Color screenprint, 14 x 13
Courtesy of Brian Chippendale

Yes, but it was really rough for a long time. There’s not too much ageism now, but enough that you sometimes feel isolated or left out of things. I
feel like the older artists’ work and their lifestyle is so strong because it has strength in numbers. They can all inspire each other; help each other; be
competitive with each other; and there’s drama. There was conflict and love and relationships and all those wonderful things about having a big group
of creative people. When you are this young kid coming into it, it’s like being the little sister figure. I had maybe two friends to go to shows with, and I
was living at my parents’ house. You have to be really motivated to do things by yourself. It’s a completely different kind of art-making. There are some
more kids my age who have moved here in the past year or two, and it feels strong and good, and it feels like the beginning of something.

Where are they living?

Some of them live on Manton Avenue and Amherst Street. It’s only been ten years since Fort Thunder started, but the loft scene now is so differ-
ent. The buildings are all being bought and developed. The landlords know that they can charge more. It’s so expensive! I moved out of my parents’
house at the end of my senior year and moved into a loft space by myself on Harris Avenue. Even then the building was always changing ownership. It
was one of the last places that you could even remotely afford. Now don’t even bother trying to find a loft space, just get an apartment. It’s terrible.

People are still coming to Providence and Olneyville, in particular, nevertheless?

People are coming because they are years behind. It’s a ripple effect. Word spread, but even the media are five years behind. It’s a trick. People
will hear about Providence and Fort Thunder and the mills, and they will get here and realize that there aren’t many crazy mill shows anymore.

Are they still having shows?

Yes. Redrum still has shows. It’s probably the longest running show space, but there is some spark, some insanity, some combination of not car-
ing at all and caring really intensely, that is just gone. I don’t know, everyone is so scared now. There have been so many times that places have been
shut down. Who wants to put tons of money and effort into a space to move in long enough to start decorating it and start making it crazy? Word of
mouth will spread, and a month later it will be gone, and those people are a little bit more cut down.

It seems like the first generation of Olneyville artists are still here. Some people left, but the core group is still here.

They’re still here. They are mostly in their thirties now.

Are they touring more than they used to, because their bands have gotten sort of established?

No, they are probably touring the same amount, but they are playing different kinds of shows — bigger venues, sometimes with booking agents.

Is it possible to do that and not get corrupted by the commercial system?

It’s a struggle and conflict I think a lot of people have inside of them.

How do these artists survive financially?

I think the key is to stay in as cheap a place as possible. Survive on less than $10,000 a year. Everyone is really good at it. Everyone is resourceful.

You were really helpful to me in talking about the different styles of screenprinting. Maybe you can say a little bit about that and what you think is
innovative about the screenprinting process and how, in particular, some of the artists have used it.

Mat Brinkman

To Lioe and Shaoe in LA., October 25, 1 999
Color screenprint, 19x25
Courtesy of Brian Chippendale

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Robert Cizami

A Terrorist Is Born, August 5, 2005
Screenprint, 28 x 19 (irregular)
Courtesy of Dirt Palace

Well, it’s really great compared to the stuff in this book that came out a while ago called The Art of Modern Rock . I wasn’t too aware of screen-
printing outside of Providence, but I knew a lot about it here. I didn’t know if anyone did it outside of Providence. I looked in the book and thought,
“Man, that stuff is terrible.” I don’t know how to describe it. It’s all naked ladies. There’s nothing wrong with naked ladies, but using it just to advertise
metal shows... Everything is black outline, very cartoony. With screenprinting, because it uses color separation, it’s prone to look like a paint-by-num-
ber picture. Then you look at the stuff from Providence and Montreal. It’s insane with patterns overlapping. People are working with the transparen-
cies of inks, different types like metallics or iridescents. Everything is fancy. Posters would be irregularly shaped, cut out, assembled, stickers on them;
breaking every rule of printmaking that you can think of. Traditionally, people used to use rubylith [a transparent red film] to cut out transparencies.
Nowadays, everyone uses computers instead, but not these guys. No! Forget all that! They’re going to do some cruddy photocopy transparency; or
a really beautiful drawing, or both in the same poster. Anything. They used a variety of media —screenprinting, drawing in crayon, fabric, foam, or
objects like a chair. No rules! Huge creativity! I wonder what snapped in them to make them want to do things that way. Maybe it was frustration with
being in art school, with having tradition and assignments to rebel against.

It’s interesting to look at some of the earlier posters, Mat Brinkman’s in particular. The earlier ones were easier to read.

Yeah. You just don’t see screenprints like that in any other part of the country, or if you do, it’s because they are influenced by Providence. Just
the number of people doing it! If you look at the database for Wunderground , there are 150 artists that we know about, but how many hundreds that
we can’t identify. You see a lot of people influencing each other. Sharing, stealing ideas, or improving on something.

Were most people working in their own studios, or were there communal studios?

Almost no one had their own screenprinting studio because it’s difficult to set up. In addition to Fort Thunder and the Dirt Palace, AS220 had a
screenprint shop, which was really great for people who weren’t entrenched in the Olneyville art scene.

Why do you think all this happened in Providence? Any particular reason?

It’s hard to know why all of these particular people came together at this moment in history and in this town. I think that it’s random. There are
art schools in tons of different cities, and there are abandoned mills in tons of cities. You just have this electric combination of people. I think it really
has to do with the people more than any other circumstance.

I don’t know that much about the music scene. Is there a relationship between noise bands and screenprinting?

That’s interesting to think about. If you look at something like Brian’s artwork and Brian’s drumming for Lighting Bolt, it’s really fast, articulate.
It’s crazy and everywhere, but it’s solid. It’s like his backgrounds are in a zillion little dots and his drumming is a zillion times in some small impossible
amount of time. How many colors can I fit on this one piece of paper? With Mat, his stuff is really loose and crazy and psychedelic and sometimes
hard to understand. Mat plays straight up noise-noise. No drums or guitars. It’s electronics. It can be beats or it can just be a freak-out. That’s what his
work is like, layer on top of layer. I don’t think that people really think that their poster style and their music style have anything to do with each other.
Everyone has a personal style. It leaks into every aspect, like clothing and the way that they each live. I think it is really important that everyone have
their own defined style.

Brian Chippendale
Lock Groove, September 23, 2000
Color screenprint, 22 x 14
Courtesy of the artist

Galen Williams

NTX + Electric , May 15, 2005

Vinyl LP record with spray paint, 12 diam.

Courtesy of Anonymouseferatu

Why do you think the show at the Museum will be important, or not?

Its so mind-blowing that Olneyville artists will have their flyers in a museum. Its insane. You can understand Fort Thunder’s installation
exhibitions, which are going on all over the world. Everyone gets that; but then we are going to juxtapose that art exploding in the public eye with
art that is happening only in Providence. The music scene and the art scene have so many different facets, different neighborhoods, and different
groups of people, and the inclusiveness of Wunderground is so amazing. I’ve catalogued two thousand posters! It’s so Providence, too, that it’s to-
tally overwhelming and insane. When I heard about it, I was really apprehensive. When I first got the job of working with the posters at the Museum,
I had this nightmare that the New York Times did a story about the show and started interviewing everyone, and they all started fighting. Then,
people got really famous as a result of the show, and it tore everyone apart, and they never spoke to each other ever again. I still have nightmares
periodically that this guy in a suit has meetings with the artists and says, “I don’t respect you. I don’t respect what you do. I just need to make money
off of you”; but now that I’ve been here, I feel so positive about it. Meeting you and Maya [Allison, Curatorial Assistant, Contemporary Art] and Tara
[Emsley, Museum Registrar], and having trust in you, which is so important to me, ...I don't worry about it at all.

It’s interesting to me that the artists wanted to present a ten-year history of Providence posters. I really felt that to make a project like this work,
it had to be generated by the artists. I wanted to do it, in part, so that Providence would recognize its own. I think that if attention is being paid out-
side, why should we be the last on the block to do so? On the other hand, the artists are so non-institutional, how do you create a show within an
institution that will still have the feel of what they do? It’s a challenge, which I knew it would be from the very beginning. It’s curious to me that when
we met as a group for the first time, the artists — I think it was Mat, one of the strong voices — said that they really wanted to have all of the posters
brought together and exhibited. It is like doing a Museum show. I didn’t expect it to take on this art-historical role.

People feel a responsibility on their shoulders, particularly the ones who are singled out by the outside art world. The idea of any institution
taking on art projects so huge and all-encompassing, it’s great!

It’s interesting that we are presenting both the old and the new. The other part of the show in the Museum’s Main Gallery (Shangri-la-la-land)
provides the opportunity for the artists to create new large-scale work. I think that is one of the really positive things about this project for the art-
ists. They can make something that they might not have the money or space to do otherwise. If you are an artist, you want to make your work. I'm
not sure how they feel about the public component. They want to be as inclusive as possible; at the same time they want to maintain a degree of
artistic control. It’s complicated. I think that the ideas really need to be generated by the artists in a case like this. It’s not a show that I could have a
preconceived idea about what it should or shouldn’t be, or even the catalogue for that matter. It should reflect the artists’ ideas and wishes.

And how many institutions would relinquish control in that way? I can’t wait to see the public reaction. I was talking to Tara about the opening
date because I might be out of the country, but I may consider postponing my plans to be here. I need to see the show. I feel like people will crawl
out of all these corners, people who haven’t been to a public event in Providence in five years; but they are going to want to see all these posters. Just
being able to see people who don’t normally have a piece in a museum — it will be really beautiful. ¥

Sasha Wiseman grew up and currently resides in Providence, where she makes posters and videos. She is a member of the Dirt Palace collective and the band Heart2Heart.

Mahi Mahi, 2003

Color screenprint with glitter on fabric, 12x17
Courtesy of Ben McOsker and Laura Mullen

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Intergalactic Wrestling Federation #6, May 18, 1999
Color screenprint (two-sided), 4x5
Courtesy of Erin Rosenthal

Friends Forever playing in the courtyard outside the Oak and Troy
Street buildings, ca. 2003. Photo by Nadav Benjamin

Halloween party. Pink Rabbit, Olneyville (Providence),
ca. 2003. Photo by Nadav Benjamin

Erin Rosenthal
Le Tigre, April 15, 2000
Color screenprint, 23 x 1 1
Courtesy of Ben McOskerand Laura Mullen

Mat Brinkman
ASM, March 17,2001
Photocopy, 11x17
Courtesy of Brian Chippendale

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The Flying Luttenbachers, December 6, 2001
Laser-jet print, 11x9
Courtesy of the artist

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Color screenprint, 17x6
Courtesy of Jenny Nichols

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Color screenprint, 17 x 11
Courtesy of Jo Dery

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Xander Marro

Brown Pride Month, March 2001

Color screenprint on wrapping paper, 1 9 x 24

Courtesy of the artist

Leif Goldberg
Vote Toste, September 6, 2002
Color screenprint, 23 x 14
Courtesy of Brian Chippendale

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Arab on Radar, November 22, 2002
Color screenprint, 1 8 x 24
Courtesy of Michael K. Gaughan

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Irene Moon, September 7, 2002
Screenprint on fabric, 19 x 21
Courtesy of the artist

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Dirty Rainbou), March 13, 2003
Photocopy with spray paint, 11x17
Courtesy of Brian Chippendale

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Xander Marro

Fantastical Political Puppetry, December 12, 2003
Color screenprint, 23x16
Courtesy of Erin Rosenthal

jean Cozzens

Blood from a Turnip , November 21, 2003
Color screenprint, 16 x 10
Courtesy of Leif Goldberg

jo Dery

Mirah, November 12, 2003
Color screenprint, 22x1 7
Courtesy of the artist

Jim Drain
Totem Tour ; spring 2003
Color screenprint, 23 x 17
Courtesy of Brian Chippendale

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Xander Marro

Bird Songs of the Bauharoque, 2003
Color screenprint, 35x10
Courtesy of the artist

Only in Lonelyville

Sara Agniel

Gallery Agniel, Providence

Forcefield (I. to r", Meerk Puffy, Gorgon Radeo, Patootie Lobe), Conklin Quarry, Lincoln, Rhode lslandT2002'

Photo by Hisham Akira Bharoocha

this exhibition examines not a school of poster artists, or a music scene,
or really an art movement of any kind. There have been efforts to qualify it in
such ways, to wrap terminology around things that bubbled organically to the
surface here in Providence, Rhode Island, during the decade that bookended
the millennium. For me, at least, this exhibition is proof not of a movement,
but of an attempt — through art — to build and then occupy an alternate real-
ity. I think all that anyone was ever really trying to do was make, on his or her
own terms, a better version of the disappointing world we live in today. These
artists had ideas about how they would like their lives to be, ideas radically
different from what we are told is “just the way things work,” and they defi-
antly set out to make the ideas reality. The living and working spaces carved
out of open floor plans in Olneyville’s nineteenth-century factories were and
are autonomous zones that in their nonconformance, by their very existence,
reject authority. Instead of wasting time telling the unsatisfactory world why
it was such a letdown, people got to work building themselves an alternative.
This is an inherently political act.

This exhibition is really about the worlds that people built in Olney ville
in which to live, work, collaborate, and make shows. What is truly bizarre is
that this exhibition is even happening, because we all know you’re not sup-
posed to live in these industrially zoned buildings. You’re certainly not sup-
posed to have throngs of people assembling to attend concerts in them.
You’re not supposed to build walls out of fabric or fill rooms with flammable
art supplies. Technically, you’re not supposed to do almost any of what hap-
pened in these places; yet we have hung these beautiful posters for illegal
events in a museum, and we celebrate the fact that they did happen. We have
even invited the artists to create an installation that is essentially a customized
version of their “dangerous” homes and workplaces. This is a dubious honor.

How can we agree as a society to confer value on these acts of defi-
ance within the confines of the fine- art world and not within our city’s neigh-
borhoods? Why is the incredible live-in installation environment privileged as
brilliant by art experts and disparaged as murderously dangerous by govern-
ment officials?

These dwellings defy categorization and regulation. They will not be
assimilated, and they cannot be replicated. They are built of hard work and
magic and trash turned into art. They are relatives of the Merzbau and the
kibbutz, of Freetown Christiania and your childhood tree house. I have never
taken anyone to a studio visit in one of these places who was not completely
captivated by the mesmerizing transformation of space. When you walk in-
side you are taken away to another world — you get to go somewhere you
hadn’t imagined existed before — you are quite simply carried away.

The artists who built the forts and palaces of Olneyville made every-
thing they could themselves out of what they found at hand, transforming
society’s detritus into an art-filled world. In our capitalist culture, just making
a thing you need instead of buying it is subversive, and these folks built it all. I
have an enormous amount of respect for the work ethic of this group of indi-
viduals. They have demonstrated over and over an interest in making things
the harder but better way — the way that often takes longer but is ultimately
more satisfying. The end results inspire awe in others who can’t sustain that
kind of long-term labor of love. The processes are not the most efficient, and
it often doesn’t make sense to a “normal” person to have done it that way—
they can’t believe anyone would take the time. This emphasis on the collec-
tive work ethic of these artists feels particularly important for me to assert
because alternative lifestyles are often written off by the mainstream as a cop
out, an option for people who can’t cut it in the real world, who don’t have
the stamina for the system. I want to underscore how hard these artists work
and the degree of commitment they bring to their work. The difference lies in
the fact that they choose what they’ll work on regardless of whether it earns
a wage or not. In our society this, too, is revolutionary, although having the
choice at all may be a luxury.

The complicated construction and decoration techniques that epito-
mize Olneyville artists’ homes are ruled by a handmade and do-it-yourself
aesthetic. When Xander Marro went to wallpaper her studio, not only did she
hand-screenprint all the wallpaper and wheat-paste it to the wall herself, she

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Movies with Live Soundtracks , October 15, 1999
Color screenprint, 16x19
Courtesy of Mat Brinkman

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(top) Pippi Zornoza
Monsters of Rock, March 28, 2003
Color screenprint, 15 x 20
Courtesy of Sara Agniel

also flocked it, a process of sprinkling tiny bits of fiber over the surface
of a paper or fabric print so that there is a raised fuzzy texture on part of
the pattern. This extra step means that Xander’s flocked wallpaper is red
and velvety and ornate and spectacular. Xander’s work is full of indulgent
moments that satisfy a lust for decadent details such as flocking. Irrever-
ent humor and delicate drawing coexist in her images alongside incisive
social critique and a seemingly unending supply of birds bent on making
their homes in the elegant hairdos of elaborately clad ladies. Similarly, her
prints for two portfolios that I have organized are never flat, never one
piece of paper, never simple works on paper. You might unfold a window
to read a fortune, open a book and grow a pyramid, pull a tab and make
a woman’s eyes move. They are interactive, folded intricacies and hidden
secrets.

Then there are the rules imposed by the artists on themselves that
make already complicated processes more arduous. I think that Pippi
Zornoza is the queen of self-imposed rules and doing things the hard way.
To consider Pippi’s processes, you need to know that she works in a va-
riety of media. She is a performer and musician, and she is a visual art-
ist. She makes screenprints, as do many other artists in Olneyville, but
she also works in archaic and complex textile techniques. Pippi sews and
quilts. She has attended international conferences on historic lacemaking
methods and has literally spent years replicating imagery in rare lace and
redwork embroidery. She has the stamina for long-term projects, but she

Brian Chippendale
Jenine Bressner, January 1 5, 2000
Color screenprint, 19 x 25
Courtesy of the artist

also relishes working with the restrictions that these methods impose. To that end,
a few years ago, she set for herself the challenge of incorporating a unicorn into
every single poster she made for one entire year. Being involved in performing
in her own musical projects and in organizing shows and being a favored poster-
maker among her friends, Pippi happens to make a lot of posters, so this was no
easy task. On top of her penchant for complicated processes, Pippi tends toward
material choices that make her work even more elaborate and luscious than the
average screenprint. She prints on synthetic fabrics, vinyl, and industrial-scale rib-
bon, often procured for free from the recycling center, and uses glitter with a lib-
eral hand. Pippi’s prints are frosted and indulgent punk tapestries.

Another artist whose processes demand more, more, more, is Brian Chip-
pendale. Brian has the most literal practice of turning trash into decor: the waxed-
paper soy-milk containers and empty plastic honey bears and Cap’n Crunch cere-
al boxes from his own consumption end up cladding his walls and ceilings. Brian
is the most obsessive person I have ever encountered in his need to fill every inch
of his home with time-consuming decorating projects. He covers all the surfaces
with art. It ends up leaking all over the room around him little by little, so that over
time walls and ceilings and floors kind of grow together and merge. When Bri-
an moved out of Fort Thunder and into his Troy Street studio, the new place was
bare. The first time I really noticed the leaking and spilling of his energies hitting
that space was when one day a column in the center of the room was naked and
the next it was creeping and crawling with multicolored dots of paint marching up
the surface from floor toward ceiling. I saw the column grow because I was visiting
daily to get a print from Brian on a deadline. The deadline was so urgent that I was
checking in at the studio every day to see his progress, and every day there was
more decorating done and a slightly advanced print. The dots on the column and
the floor around it were made with the colors of the ink in the print, and the print
had close to eighty screens, so the column was getting a lot of love until Brian got
distracted and starting working on the bathroom. He never actually got enough
dots on that pole before he moved, evicted again. Brian’s prints are just like his
abodes; always filled to the absolute edge with buzzing pattern, like a soundtrack
over which the text and figures act or a landscape that they move through. Brian’s
music and his comics and his prints and his collages and his rooms are all little
worlds unto themselves filled with his made-up guys doing stuff in his made-up
landscape, his ideas filling and erasing the real world, replacing it with a new one.

How do you begin to erase the rest of the world and make new points of ref-
erence, new realities to believe in?

To start with, people named their houses. Language constructs meaning,
and names create identity. This is important because when something has a name
it can be referenced. It can be talked about: Fort Thunder, the Dirt Palace, the
Bakery, the Sickle, Munch House, Redrum, the Candle Factory, the Hilarious At-
tic, and so many others. When you need to communicate that you are going to an
event at your friends’ place and seven people in fact live there, it is easier to say,
“I’m going to the Fort” than it is to say, “I’m going to Mat and Brian and Jim and
Erik and Erin and Leif and Raphael’s house.” Having a house name is helpful. I re-
alized this when the residents of the Hilarious Attic took an inordinately long time
to pick their name after moving in. I thought of them collectively as their phone
number until they got a name and an identity.

Invented place names are also important when you want to let people know
how to get to a show that isn’t supposed to be happening, according to the law. A
new language is crafted with code names and pseudonyms for code names and
tricky spellings and plays on words and special barely legible fonts that entertain
the indoctrinated and confound the ignorant in the treasure hunt for information.
Mat Brinkman was the best at creating fonts that cloaked information from the
uninitiated and made it impossible for interloper and fire marshal alike to discern
venue locations, dates, and times. Mat built a font that was an outline distillation of
the edge of a piece of writing, a trace of the periphery of the font’s form, but only of
one side of the text, the outline of the top, the skyline of the words. It is very difficult
to read unless you expect the information, unless you already know the names of
the bands, the names of the place where the show is meant to happen. It is the
sparest indication of text, and hence it is entirely cryptic. He also evolved a pen-
chant for a particular bubble font — the esoteric older brother of the version
universally practiced by middle-school note writers. Both of these fonts served a

Mat Brinkman

Melt Banana, October 14, 1998
Color screenprint, 35 x 23
Courtesy of Brian Chippendale

Brian Chippendale on elephant, Fort Thunder, Olneyville
(Providence), ca. 1997. Photo by Hisham Akira Bharoocha

Mat Brinkman

Men's Recovery Project, October 31, 1997
Color screenprint, 23 x 17
Courtesy of Brian Chippendale

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Trutheatertheater, August 27, 2005
Color screenprint, 23 x 17
Courtesy of Brian Chippendale

purpose by being cryptic, but aesthetics ultimately trump the need to hide
the information. First and foremost, Mat’s fonts look really great whether
you can read them or not.

From cryptic writing, code names, and secret forts it seems to follow
naturally that performing in costume and mask would become the standard
for Olneyville’s noise bands and performance projects. When trying to es-
tablish an alternative reality, imagination and fantasy are powerful tools
with which to combat the omnipresence of the everyday world. Imagination
is the ultimate escape hatch. If were all being honest, who hasn’t thought
that there has to be a better way, something more than the work-sleep-work
again routine that “the system” offers? The exploration of alter ego in this
generation’s work has definitely been influenced by mutant superheros,
alien creatures, and magical monsters from comic books; science-fiction lit-
erature and film; and fantasy role-playing games. Examples of the use of
costume and mask in performance range from the psychedelic, neon, pat-
terned, knitted full-body shrouds made by Jim Drain for Forcefield’s Rogga-
boggas to the more literal oversized mouse heads and lab coats of the band
White Mice. When the musical duo Ninja versus Wrestler perform, Miles
Lacouture and Erik Tally play a free-form, improvised battle on bass and vi-
ola respectively. Erik dresses as a ninja and Miles as a Lucha Libre masked
fighter in the Mexican professional wrestling style, their costumes carefully
yet carelessly made, the mask intricate, the cape a printed bed sheet. The
very name of their project is reflective of the fact that under their assumed
personalities they will be jousting sonically as opposed alter egos. It’s literal-
ly all about being in character. It should be noted that the mask in which Bri-
an Chippendale performs with the rock group Lightning Bolt is also a little
bit like a Mexican wrestling mask; that is, if you shredded one that had been

made out of your little brother’s t-shirts in the first place and then
sewed it back together with yarn. The costumes are important more
for show and function than for their technical perfection, in most cas-
es. Brian’s holds his voice-distorting microphone in his mouth while
he plays. Rich Porter and Brian Gibson perform in Barkley’s Barn-
yard Critters in costume approximations of the animal characters
from Gibson’s eponymous digital-animation movies. Jo Dery and Pe-
ter Glantz make movies that jump between animation and live action
in the personae of characters Peace Fun Fun and Hope Fancy Fancy.
The list goes on, the personalities and characters, the monikers and
pseudonyms abound. Mat Brinkman has on his resume an abbreviat-
ed list of names under which he has recorded work, including: Mr.
Brinkman, Forcefield, MindFlayer, Meerk Puffy, Danse Asshole,
Krap, Freak Zone, Jamborghini, Monstrosity Brinkman, Mystery
Brinkman, M. C. Brinkmandibles. When performing under an al-
tered identity, the work itself has to stand on its own. The process is
not about establishing a reputation as an individual talent so often
privileged by our culture’s penchant for establishing hierarchies of
value and success. Disguise and pseudonym foil recognition and the
cult of the individual, allowing the artwork, the performance to be in
the foreground.

In the work of some of the artists in this exhibition, access-
ing an imaginary other or an alternate reality involves a connection
to the spirit, animal, and natural world. Making their homes in mills
originally built along the banks of the Woonasquatucket River, they
are all close to poignant intersections of the natural and built envi-
ronment. In Olneyville, the dirty city rubs close along the river’s edge,

Photo by Hisham Akira Bharoocha

and the weight of a hundred-plus years of industrial waste is palpable. Peter
Glantz creates live theatre that deals with the failing health of the planet, hope
for world peace, and the quest for identity and personal fulfillment. The plays
are usually musicals, and the songs and dialogue are prerecorded, so the per-
formers mime the play in sync with the soundtrack. The plays address senti-
mental and philosophical issues through song without being insincere or hokey
in any way. Peter achieves a carefully struck balance, and his plays are dramatic
examples of a strain of interest in the natural world that also resonates in the
work of Jungil Hong, Leif Goldberg, and Erin Rosenthal.

Jungil’s installations and prints invoke worlds where environmental deg-
radation is meted out in metaphor and symbol, opaque critiques and warnings:
upside-down trees, flaming birds that fly under water, smoking stumps, and
blood-red skies. They are intensely patterned images where the crying planet
seems to effectively give up its ghost for us to witness, images that hold a mirror
to reality and reflect back the fact that something clearly isn’t right. Olneyville
is on fire, and the river rushes past. Leif balances humor and apocalypse in his
work, whether it be in his National Waste comic books, his screenprints, or his
hand-cranked mutoscopes, which are essentially hand-painted flip-book ani-
mations. He imbues his animal characters with wit and charm, and the viewer
identifies with the animals even as the beasts approach the human world with
disdain. In Leifs detailed drawings, the city melts from buildings into psyche-
delic patterns and back again, and bright neons swirl between fine line work.
His printing methods are tight and technically impressive and his politics lucid
— animals trump humans every time.

Erin also works with animals in her film, animation, puppetry, and
prints, but more prominent is her use of archetypes and reduced imagery. Erin
uses color to symbolic effect and simple geometries to build structure in her

spaces. She distills the players in her images to basics — triangles,
circles, lines, and arrows — evoking a basic or essential iconogra-
phy akin to ancient petroglyphs. Erin’s work is tinged with some-
thing sacred, as if over the years her method of distilling faces and
figures down to geometric forms has developed into her own sym-
bology. The work too has a deep vein of irreverent humor, and Erin
launches mischievous narratives with compellingly funny charac-
ters who lurk behind trees rubbing their hands together, cackling in
anticipation.

Something rare and wonderful gelled in Olneyville over the
past ten years. An unusual number of brilliant individuals with a
powerful work ethic and the requisite talent to make their efforts
worthwhile for the rest of us converged and settled there for a time.
Now, it is beginning to break apart. The spaces are disappearing,
falling to development dollars, the use changes, and the people
get going to other locales where they can be left alone again to
build anew. The urge to create a better reality through alternative
communities does not disappear, and those in Olneyville will be
replaced by others like them. That process is unstoppable, but it
is the intention behind the life that is unstoppable. The art itself is
rooted in time and place. It doesn’t seem important to try to quanti-
fy why this work or these artists are different, more worthy of going
down in history, from any others who have built their little worlds
apart and spawned movements, because the motivating instinct
is universal. Nonetheless, there is something that resonates in this
artwork. Some of it will not go away. It will be held up for years to
come as a transcendent achievement. And it should be. V

"V- • . • ■

Audience at White Mice concert, Munc
Photo by Nadav Benjamin

House, Olneyville (Providence), ca. 2003.

Hawnay Troof in concert at Valhalla, Olneyville (Providence)^200^
Photo by Nadav Benjamin

85 Rob Coggeshall on stilts, Fort Thunder, Olneyville (Providence),
ca. 1997. Photo by Hisham Akira Bharoocha

Mat Brinkman, Halloween Kid , papier-mache, paint;
window installation (detail). Dirt Palace, Olneyville
(Providence), ca. 2004. Photo by Xander Marro

Costume parade. Benefit Street, Providence, ca. 1998

Photo by Hisham Akira Bharoocha

Screenprinting studio. Fort Thunder, Olneyville (Providence), 2000.

Photo by Hisham Akira Bharoocha, orginally shot for nest magazine (Summer 2001)

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Leif Goldberg
Beyond the Spin , 2003
Gocco print, 6x4
Courtesy of Erin Rosenthal

Jungil Hong, Intergalactic Peaceful Shooting Range, screenprint on paper;
installation (detail) in exhibition Full Fathom Fire, Space 1026, Philadelphia, 2005.
Photo by Adam Wallacavage

Jamie Drake
Butcherings, June 18, 2004
Color screenprint, 12x9
Courtesy of Brian Chippendale

Raphael Lyon

Haunted, September 11, 2004

Crushed aluminum beer can with white correction fluid, 3x5
Courtesy of Peter Clantz

Cybele Collins
Ail Female Noise Fest, June 13, 2004
Color screenprint, 16x16 (diamond)
Courtesy of Anonymouseferatu

Erin Rosenthal

A Magical Musical Picnic , September 3, 2004
Color screenprint, 11x15
Courtesy of Sasha Wiseman

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Pippi Zornoza

Alec K . Redfearn & Tfte Eyesores , 2004
Color screenprint on fabric, 15x15
Courtesy of Lee Buford

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Muffy Brandt

Olneyuille Fall Festiual , October 29, 2005
Color photocopy, 17x11
Courtesy of Brian Chippendale

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jungil Hong

Off the Beat (radio show), 2005
Color screenprint, 23 x 21
Courtesy of Brian Chippendale

jungil Hong

Afriram po, July 20, 2005
Color screenprint, 26 x 19
Courtesy of Brian Chippendale

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Christopher Forgues
Rose for Bodhan, August 13, 2005
Color screenprint, 18 x 23
Courtesy of Jenny Nichols

Pippi Zornoza
Ouo, May 6, 2005
Color screenprint with glitter, 20 x 25
Courtesy of Sasha Wiseman

Beatrice McCeoch

Community Supported Agriculture, n.d.
Color screenprint, 16x9
Courtesy of the artist

101

Mike Taylor
Flaws, November 6, 2005
Color screenprint with collage, 22 x 17
Courtesy of Ben McOskerand Laura Mullen

102

Jungil Hong

Lightning Bolt, May 27, 2005
Color screenprint, 23 x 20
Courtesy of Brian Chippendale

103

Joel Kyack
Smokey Wind, March 30, n.d.
Color screenprint, 24 x 18
Courtesy of Michael K. Caughan

104

Shawn Greenlee
Landed, December 1 3, 1 997
Color screenprint, 14 x 21
Courtesy of the artist

106 Wrestling event. Fort Thunder, Olneyville (Providence), ca. 1 996.
Photo by Hisham Akira Bharoocha

107

ben mcosker

Damned if I can figure out Providence as a community, never mind as a
town. It’s padded with some rowdy artists, and new faces seem to cycle
through constantly. As an older gent, I remember seeing foppery of all va-
riety starting when I went to school here in the late 1980s. Roller-skating
parties, gymnastic rats... you name it.

Fast forward a few years to the early 1990s and some puzzling fly-
ers turning up all around town, wheat-pasted to lampposts, traffic-switch
boxes, and walls. Some of the first posters were for freak flag burners like
the Boredoms and Doo Rag. A definite crew of people was responsible for
this, and it was later learned that they had moved from RISD further down
to an old mill space on Atwells Avenue. Word spread around that shows
were happening at this space, later dubbed Fort Thunder. Although time
has dunted my memory of the first show I saw there, I remember amateur
wrestling, Quintron, Karp, and the Scissor Girls cycling through. Shows
weren’t crowded, as people were still a little new to the idea of going to
this desolate location just outside of Olneyville.

A few years later, a building across the street from Fort Thunder
started being occupied by more artists... that building was at 556 Atwells
and commonly called “556.” At that point there began a bizarre dash to
present some XXL freakshow culture. Bike armadas would take to the
streets in drunken formation, Zany Zappers would march in Colonel
Sanders lines through the WaterFire® masses, and shows would happen
with no warning.

Zip ahead a few years, and a group of women establish another
Olneyville outpost called the Hive... then the Dirt Palace. Another lodge
of cosmic convergences starts in another location. The gates of Olneyville
were now open!

Posters that you are now looking at on the walls were popping out
at a rate of 6.2 posters/second. Screenprinted flyers were made for shows
that could never exist, never mind even happen. Eventually Fort Thunder
closed so that Staples® could have a parking lot.

Because Olneyville was on the map with the Dirt Palace, urban
astronauts moved all over the area, as spaces were there and cheap. Ven-
ues opened with names like Redrum, Box of Knives, the Pink Rabbit, the
Sickle, the Hilarious Attic, the Candle Factory, Waxy Palace, the Bulb
Clubhouse, the Bakery, the Gold Mine, the Munch House, and the Provi-
dence Civic Center. Shows were happening every three minutes.

All good things come to an end, of course, and many of these ven-
ues closed on a cold day three years ago when the city decided to evict
everyone en masse from the Oak and Troy Street buildings (and Provi-
dence, the City of the Arts, has proved not to really care much for art that
is anything but silent and on a wall), so people have become pretty inven-
tive at finding new spaces to avoid the prying eyes of the Providence Po-
lice State. Some of these places are legit, some not so much. Posters tell
you when to be there and who’s playing. It’s that simple. Even if you can’t
read them.

The attitude all these times inspired, and the freaky fraternity it
invited, is going to be the legacy. The posters are a nice reminiscence, I
suppose, but it’s really just freeze-drying something that is still happen-
ing. What are you doing tonight?

Ben McOsker is the janitor at Load Records, a Providence-based plastics media
music manufacturer.

108

meredith stern mike taylor

Three Points to Consider in Wunderground

Nostalgia is a funny thing, how it can turn a biscuit into a sweet cake, or a sweet
plum into a moldy peach. We are left with a game of how to discern the differ-
ence between fact and fiction from our memories. This is where trophies and
souvenirs come in handy: they allow us to relive our experiences, to own them.

I remember going to shows at Fort Thunder in 1997 and always feeling
a sense of excitement and wonderment. My friend Rachel and I were shy and
new to town. We would sit atop a pile of mattresses and watch whatever chaos
was to unfold. We had both been a part of punk scenes of black-clad straight-
edge nihilists preoccupied by the end of the world. Going to shows in Provi-
dence made us feel like we were finally around people who believed in life and
living as an art form. There was a struggle inherent in the whole scene. No one
knew how long the space would be theirs. Like most punk clubs, ownership
wasn’t even an option. It was a matter of creating temporary terror zones to un-
leash extravagant visions; living life however we felt at any given moment. This
could mean band practice at midnight or creating dangerous mazes to send
dozens of people through, because it would be fun. There was a disillusion-
ment with the way other folks chose to do things; so instead, a new world was
created. There was a beauty in the instability of it all, in the unknown. Shows
at the Fort changed the energy and expectation of all music shows, which has
inspired and conspired with AS220, the Living Room, the Safari, the Grow
Room, and other underground art spaces like the Bakery and the Dirt Palace.

Going to a show in Providence still means you could be seeing anything
from a band to a slide show. You know it will surprise you somehow, even if it
isn’t earth shattering, and of course, there is a ton of art. People throw up their
drawings on the walls, on the ceilings, on their band equipment, on the street,
and on their bodies. Life is art, and it’s meant to be seen, used, and cast away
when something else comes along. The lack of a sterile, white-walled environ-
ment is what makes it all so exciting. Art has been released from the walls of
galleries and is here and there for everyone to look at on a pole in the street,
or on the window of a school building, announcing something fun to do. Post-
ers are a beautiful thing, utilitarian in their purpose of bringing attention to
an event, then obsolete except as a souvenir to remember how we spent that
evening blacked-out drunk, dancing, or ramped up on candy. It’s the posters
for the shows that trigger the emotions and memories of living life by the seat
of our pants.

The loose memories are what become the sea of nostalgia. Living in the
moment has almost become obsolete as video cameras are now so common as
to be in many people’s cell phones. People want to hold onto the show, the art
of life, to re-live within the comfort of their own homes for years to come. The
document or souvenir becomes more important than the event itself; and life,
or living, becomes a commodity. I think it is living in the moment that makes
the art exciting to me, the nonmarketability of so many of the events and the
art that sprung from Fort Thunder and has continued to grow that is truly in-
spiring. Collecting many of these posters in one room is a beautiful boat sailing
on a sea of nostalgia.

Meredith Stern is a linoleum-block printmaker and drummer living in Providence. She
recently co-curated Pocket Change with Pippi Zornoza and is currently editing a chapter
for a book on AK Press of contemporary printmakers.

1. I wonder if Mat even remembers the comic where he wrote,
“Shadows move between lightning flashes.”

Don’t forget, RISD is advocating an illegal activity with this
show! Wheat-pasting is illegal! And magical! Have you ever actually
SEEN someone wheat-pasting one of these posters to an electrical
box, or street sign, or underpass or whatever? You probably haven’t.
Because we’re magic. We’re faster than carpal tunnel syndrome and
can go out in ten-degree weather, when the wheatpaste has frozen be-
fore we can get the poster up. For every February show, someone was
out, putting up posters at night, on foot or on a bicycle. We can also ap-
parently outrun health insurance; so here’s to a crossing of fingers and
our attempts at a healthy diet.

2. Rock music is as cool as a leather jacket. It's a dated signifier,
get it? Music is as good as its content and delivery, and it’s doubt-
ful that any genre can hold an inherent alterity for long within a
capitalist market, which thrives on an obsolescence cycle.

When I was sixteen I went to every show I could wrangle a ride
to. At eighteen I spent so many nights out and psyched that I couldn’t
imagine the excitement not being a part of my life in the past or ever
again. At twenty-five I still couldn’t let myself miss anything, because
even though patterns had emerged and things could get predictable,
you never know ; at thirty, shows have become more of an analogy for
a way of doing other things than the thing itself. And by “other things”
I mean Every Thing: Don’t seek permission. Ask for help and help with-
out being asked. Creativity is a contagious virtue. Set the bar higher.
Sleep comes last.

There are over two thousand posters in the show. That’s two
thousand nights: some eight thousand hours spent together in the
dark; allowing for repeat visits and a sloppy averaging of memberships,
around 18,000 friends and visitors in ten years. Not bad for a bunch
of miscreants, considering the head of Mayor Cicilline’s Department of
Arts, Culture and Tourism costs Providence $90,000 a year.

Think about what you’ve done with the past ten years’ worth of
late nights. Ten years in an underground, trying to inch below winter’s
freeze, away from the erosive wind of public attention, roots slowly in-
terweaving. Here is evidenced a single expansive organism, append-
ages poking through the city’s surface at various points, manifesting
ten years of winters in unheated rooms, sleeping on stranger’s floors,
smoothing things out with the police.

3. Excitement is fleeting and flux is the only constant.

Providence was slow to redefine its obsolete infrastructure. Pri-
or to New Urbanism (and regular old vanilla money)’s decision to take
back a city long ago ceded to white flight, there was a window open be-
tween the city’s atrophying industrial muscle and the cavernous mills
left behind. It’s taken the city’s government ten years and a couple of
highly embarrassing media debacles to realize that there was anything
of cultural worth going on at all. All the paid positions and open floor-
plan condos in town won’t foster a creative exchange like the one rep-
resented here. And as much as this show shouldn’t mark the end of
anything, it’s equal parts wedding and funeral. Something new is hap-
pening right now that even its instigators are unsure of. New forms and
colors and sounds the likes of which have yet to be codified are what
perpetuate the spirit that museum walls can’t capture.

Mike Taylor lives and works in Providence, for better or worse, drawing and printing
and making music all the livelong day.

110

cybcle collins

hanna fushihara aron

There was a show last night in a vacant apartment with extension cords
running to an upstairs socket. It started near midnight in a former bed-
room with writing on the wall — something about a valley — and some
blind-striped streetlight from the window, no other lights. The last band
wasn’t fast enough, and I lay down on some leftover furniture to stretch
and think. The room had people in it whom I like and love, don’t know,
and haven’t seen in a while; none of us talking, drinking, or eating for the
moment. The show had been set up the night before, so most of us in the
room had at least met each other, mostly through shows.

All I knew that I wanted to do with people when I was young was
what I did alone: make things, walk around, think, and go strange plac-
es. I gave up on talking to people for a while, and the refusal to inter-
act meant that I didn’t get a handle on mistakes and identity until later.
I walked around by myself at night when I was 14 and wrote in alleys. I
knew that taking control of your sense of reality was essential, but I didn’t
feel like it was possible. Anger and despair felt like controls, parts of me
that couldn’t change; stories in ’zines and music were what I found to for-
get that, and they could even cure a state of mind. It might be sad that
the things I like now about my hometown in Colorado are what haven’t
changed, the mountains and its past, but that’s what I love. It became ex-
pensive; the dance and music clubs shut down when I was 16 because of
rent, and local businesses have been pushed out for ideas and products
that have been proven to make a lot of money, that appeal to a sense of
comfort, of aesthetic ideals instead of beliefs.

In the first year I moved to Providence, I went to find Fort Thun-
der one night after hearing about it from someone I knew from a zine. I
saw a band (without instruments) that sang about sex with furniture and
was pushed on a swing by strangers during another show. I found some
places I liked while walking around that still have their spaces carved out
from when they were needed. I heard about one of them later, a tunnel,
in stories that included giant praying-mantis puppets and a barge made
for a show over pools of water on the tracks (a soup of minerals, oil, some
growths without light, and dissolved parts of whatever’s been inside — a
car, people, and fire) all things that proved the hand-written magazines
true.

I don’t know if competition and conquest will ever lose the respect
people give them or if I could get rid of the attraction to those things in
me or would if it were possible; but I’ve never believed that it’s all there is.
I was ready for proof of something beyond the standard power games.
Proof isn’t what happened to get me away from my sense that I was con-
trolled and that there are set ways things have to go; instead, there was
inspiration, help, luck, and will, because that change is not about waiting
or hoping and measuring results. Sometimes the pressures and manipu-
lations of our society are funny, or you have to escape them; sometimes
they don’t matter. To go beyond a respect for success, the ability to laugh
at or ignore that what seems to be important is strength; to give attention
to things beyond what you know; and the ability to choose what it is you
trust, how you live and feel are what add up to a different kind of force.

Cybele Collins lives in Providence and has played in Blue Shift, Drumba Rhumba,
Dreamhouse, Mating Dance, Bulimia Party, Mercy Light, Kumonokumo (cloud of
spiders), Russian Tsarcasm, Numena, Bone Rattle, and unnamed acts in the last
two years; mostly violin and feedback, sometimes drums and singing, sometimes
for just one night.

At Fort Thunder I saw what I now try to emulate in my own life: a seamless
flow between Art and Life and Life and Art. At once they were all the same
with no boundaries.

There is one simple act that I remember so clearly, that I have kept
deep in my heart where it continually feeds my childlike soul. One evening
in the kitchen at the Fort, Mat was making pea soup and Raphael had
started chopping beets to cook in a pan. There were other people taking
turns at the stove. There was lots of hungry energy; arms and hands reach-
ing over each other to check on their dinner. Raphael looked up at me with
a piece of juicy beet in one hand, scanned my blank face, and asked me to
come near. When I did, he took the piece of beet in his hand and rubbed it
on my cheeks. He took a step back to inspect me, rubbed my cheeks with
his fingers, and gave me his approval. I imagined I looked like I had little
red circles on my cheeks like Raggedy Ann.

There were many spontaneous blips of happy moments like that at
the Fort; like it was a bubble machine for big-kid colorful dreams. I remem-
ber having conversations while swinging on the swing inside with a big
bear staring down at me. I remember the first time I was there and people
had just started to build their separate living areas. Rob showed me his,
which looked like a dollhouse cut in half. There wasn’t a wall to separate
his area from the common space yet, and you could see straight into the
bi-level room. ‘This is my computer room down here.” Then he scrambled
up to the second level, “And this is my bedroom up here.”

Details get hazy as the years go by. My mind fills in the blanks.
Events get cut and pasted together in a nonchronological way; but my
memories of the Fort keep getting bigger, brighter, and more enchanted.

I imagine by the time I’m eighty I will tell a grandiose tale. “Once upon a
time there was a magical place called Fort Thunder...”

Hanna Fushihara Aron graduated from RISD in 1 995. She is the owner of Little Cakes Little
Gallery in New York, and the Creative Director of the HaNNa store and Gallery in Tokyo,
japan. She fondly remembers Brian Chippendale when he had long hair and wore a Nirvana
shirt. Mat Brinkman escapingfrom the inside of a cop car, and when Rob Coggeshall used
to wear a heavy cassette tape player around his neck that played the Pixies.

Ill

Costume parade, Benefit Street, Providence, ca. 1998.
Photo by Hisham Akira Bharoocha

Members of Forcefield (I. to r., Gorgon Radeo and Meerk Puffy), Fort Thunder, Olneyville (Providence), 2000.
Photo by Hisham Akira Bharoocha, originally shot for nest magazine (Summer 2001)

Brian Chippendale s Ml witrMTiasKe^^siaents, Fort Thunder, Olneyville (Providence), 2000.

115

dave fischer

lu heintz

WYGIWYG was originally intended as an inversion of core Fort Thunder
ideology. Pursuing a similar ratio of realifictional elements, but with di-
vergent application and focus, we attempted a complete role reversal be-
tween venue, performer, and audience. In essence it was entertainment,
but in actual effect, the performers were left outside in the rain, while the
audience lay sleeping in the sun. The development from clearly defined
performer/audience roles of traditional events, to the inclusive commu-
nity of the Fort, to the complete abstraction of the event, was an evolution
that should have been obvious from that start. In the end, WYGIWYG’s
demise was central to its conception, and everyone lived happily ever af-
ter (except the landlord).

Dave Fischer lives in Providence and does graphic design in raw postscript, using vi.

Underground, Movement, Scene; call it what you will, but what this work
is evidence of is Community, in its truest sense. We are a group of people
who live, eat, sleep, work, and play together. We love and teach each oth-
er, work for one another, barter goods, and share resources. The screen-
printing is a common language, passed down and around; our stories.

What did Providence have at a certain moment in time that could
foster such a thing?

Just a little more Time and Space.

This is what I have learned from this family. In all the dialogues
about Community and what needs to be present for it to thrive, think about
what does not need to be there. This is a group of people that lives on less
and in doing so has time to create and gather. The vacant lots of Provi-
dence, the extra spaces between words, moments to breathe, and the suf-
fering economy allowed for the people to grow into a more self-designed
network.

And so what happens now? Now that all the Space is in demand,
and it seems maybe the Time has come to move on. What happens is this
show: by definition surfacing the underground, putting our culture in a
museum, drawing a line between our past and now. The economic revival
of Providence squeezes us out, and it is up to us to see if we can hold on to
each other across more time and space.

Lu Heintz lived in Providence from 1997 to 2006 as a student, sculptor, painter,
printmaker, blacksmith, metalworker, teacher, bartender, waitress, lover, insomniac,
and bill-payer.

116

early ptak

bob arellano

It was November 12 of 1996 and time for the first tour for Nautical Almanac.

At the time, the members of Nautical Almanac were Nate, Sol, and Twig;
accompanying with their own plans were Dirty Tony (and his cat), Leif, Kim,

Bekka, myself, and Pony, Sols dog. We had no idea what to expect in Provi-
dence and were thrilled to find the home of what were obviously kindred spir-
its. Their warehouse space was decorated much like our own houses: packed
to the gills with stuff, and not just any old junk. Each gnarled piece was specifi-
cally chosen and lovingly placed. There was also a warm kitchen with food for
all and talk of visiting a train tunnel later in the night that had recently been
pried open after being closed up for two years. We were regaled with the story
of the last party there, which apparently involved three hundred people (many
naked), satanic rituals, cops in riot gear, and the national news. Naturally, I was
scared, but ready to go on any adventure the awesome dudes at Fort Thunder
were going to lead us on.

It was planned that two parties would go at separate times to keep
down noise and visibility. Gear was assembled for the trip. Almost unwillingly
on my part, we were going in the first party. The tunnel was described to us
as a huge two-mile underground cavern using which trains could at one time
quickly reach the city without messing up the intervening neighborhood. All I
could imagine was a dark place full of rats with no escape and the cops shortly
behind us. Providence, 1987-2003

With these thoughts in mind, I shakily made it through the extra-dark

night and across the ten feet of rails bathed in watery muck at the entrance. I was trying to figure out what about Fort Thunder has in-

As we were walking further and further into the tunnel (at least a half mile al- formed and inspired my work as a writer, something that oozes like
ready), all I could think of was the one tiny escape door that was so far back. Lovecraft out of every page of my novel Don Dimaio of La Plata.
The tunnel was unbelievably huge and cavernous. Soon we passed a burnt-out The parties, for sure, many of which I biked to across town, at first
smashed-up car. You couldn’t even imagine how it got so far in. from the East Side, later from the Armory and Edgewood; the “im-

Next thing I know, Brian is next to me saying, “What’s that sound?” and mersive arts” of the Fort itself at concerts, fun houses, and films with
I think he’s just trying to get me even more scared, but now I strain and hear live soundtracks; but it’s something more than the bands and other
it too. It’s drumming. I’m freaked. Brian says there must be someone already strange inhabitants whose posters and comics follow me all over Prov-
down there, and all I can imagine is a band of naked hobo hippies dancing idence. It’s more than recurrent images of bridges, Fleet’s big bug zap-
around a fire, and I want to turn back now; but I can’t. Next thing you know, per, and constant construction. Then it hits me, on newsprint and silk-
| there is a tiny light at that faraway entrance, and I’m sure it’s the cops; but then screen: it’s the dark, the vast dark. The bikes, the traffic, the shattered
the toilet paper/kerosene lanterns are lit, and we know it’s the next party ap- glass; the city is groaning at the heart of this art. It will all look like this
proaching. someday soon. Then, as soon as you say it, it already does. Just look.

Soon the drumming gets louder and louder. When we arrive at the +++

sound, it is revealed to be water dripping onto a bunch of tin drums and scrap

metal someone had set up and left. Contemplating the scene, even I forget my Olneyville. an awful dawn, and almost immediately a rush and hum of
fears and feel the thrill of the magical moment. After awhile people begin join- activity on Atwells, a milk truck barreling into Dunkins. a fishmonger
ing in and a full-on drum fiesta ensues. Twig and I squat to the side, enjoying raising a squeaky hatch on crabs, butterfish, and a hundred pounds of
the primal spectacle. It’s quite dark, as our group only has flashlights, which squid, the flea market sells SX-70 film for six bucks a cartridge, beat that,
have been left scattered across the ground. Soon we see a figure come up in a quiet, melancholy spot behind the mill, old, ugly trees, amaz-

front of us, peering hard. Next thing you know, a huge metal pole is swung ing they’re alive, subsisting on the underground tributaries of a world-
down “thwack in the middle of Twig’s forehead. He falls to the ground, out dirty river, the little sunlight that arrives between leaves actually dap-
cold. For a moment I consider whether this is a purposefully malicious act and pies on bare surfaces: barkless trunk, broken asphalt, mind, we sit on
if I have to fight back. Then I see Mat peer closer; see Twig; say “Oh, Shit!” and stumps, the poet laureate of R.I.P Plantations and I. she doesn’t use
slink away into the dark. Mat had hit Twig because he thought we were hunks language to tell me I have arrived at a place of sadness, the mud is ac-
of metal. I search for signs of blood. tually healing, cosmetically pleasing.

In a couple of minutes Twig comes to. Ten minutes later he seems to be who are these people about, all involved in “tasks,” the con-

all right, and we make our way back to the Fort. After a long trudge, it came stant talk of rock ‘n’ roll? are there speakers strapped high up the
time to cross the muck again, and I was the only one unlucky (or unskilled) trunks of artificial trees, hidden beneath polystyrene leaves, blaring
enough to fall in. As I stood in slime up to my knees, with a spontaneous ges- screeches and eeps? where are the trumpets and drums? (I shrink
ture of friendship Jim offered me his hand from the platform. I swear I didn’t from the presumptuousness of aggrandizing a rite as common as this
mean to pull him in, but sometimes lifelong friendships are forged in the arrival.) stomach wonders if there isn’t somewhere we can purchase a
strangest ways. chocolate croissant, saliva haunts back of throat like smoke.

Carly Ptak lives in limbo, where she has realized that her main joys are people and experi- Bob Arellano is the author of the Providence-noir novel Don Dimaio of La Plata

ences. She invents tools for alternative forms of communication and uses them, too. (Akashic Urban Surreal Series, Akashic Books, New York: 2004) and the forth-

coming border comic Dead in Desemboque: Historias de Amor y Sangre (Soft Skull
Press, Brooklyn: 2006), illustrated by William Schaff, Richard Schuler, and Alec
Thibodeau.

117

doug singsen

rob coggeshall

As a teenager growing up in Providence, Fort Thunder had a huge
impact on me. The environment inside Fort Thunder was unlike any-
thing I had seen before. Every available surface was covered with
found objects of different shapes, sizes, and colors. One of the first
things that caught my attention was a cluster of giant stuffed animals
standing along the right-hand wall in the main room. These gargan-
tuan creatures, half monstrous and half cuddly, seemed to blend right
into the crowd, as though they were just more guests at the party. Like
Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau, the building seemed to be a living organ-
ism that gradually grew and expanded over time.

The exact identity of the people responsible for Fort Thunder
was always murky to me. I had heard of Mat Brinkman, the artist who
made many of the posters Fort Thunder was famous for, but I didn’t
know who any of the other residents were. I had probably seen them
numerous times at parties there, but the fact that I didn’t know who
they were gave their presence a ghostly quality. Where they slept was
also a mystery to me, until one night when 1 accidentally wandered
into the loft’s private area. Walking through the dark and narrow cor-
ridors, I caught glimpses of tiny rooms crammed with bunk beds. The
rooms seemed so airless and dingy that I wondered how anyone could
live there.

Fort Thunder was located in Eagle Square, a derelict part of
town at the bottom of Atwells Avenue, next to a Dunkin’ Donuts sur-
rounded by warehouses and vacant lots. Arriving at Fort Thunder
was always a somewhat harrowing experience because it required
passing through the vaguely threatening crowd hanging out in the
Dunkin’ Donuts parking lot. Fort Thunder itself was on the third floor
of a huge, dilapidated warehouse in the middle of Eagle Square. Every
Sunday, there was a bustling flea market in the basement that featured
dozens of vendors, which presumably was the source for many of the
objects that decorated the loft.

For years, rumors circulated that the city was going to con-
demn the warehouse and redevelop it. Given how out of step Fort
Thunder was with Providence’s ongoing “renaissance,” with its shiny,
upscale new mall and big chain stores on Thayer Street, this conclu-
sion seemed inevitable. Although I had already left Providence by the
time this happened, it nevertheless felt like a personal loss.

Doug Singsen was born and raised in Providence. He is a PhD candidate in
Art History at the City University of New York Graduate Center and teaches
"Comics Criticism" at the School of Visual Arts and "Introduction to Art" at
Brooklyn College. He lives in the Bushwick section of Brooklyn.

For your sake I hope you cannot understand when I say how utterly standard it
feels for me to be scribbling this on the first piece of paper at hand, twenty-four
hours after the deadline; having decided thrice each way during those hours
that I do or don’t want to say anything to you, then changing my mind. Same as
it ever was ; how did I get here? Letting the days go by; letting the water hold me
down... There is little I can do to help you crawl inside an understanding of this
sensation besides invite you in and pry the door open as wide as possible.

(2/17-18/2005) I had a dream we were on this island. Someone was in
trouble out in the water, and the lifeguard/policeman said there was nothing
he could do; but I said I could swim out and save the person. As I was planning
how best to do this, watching carefully the waves, I saw that there were two rows
of sharp reefs completely ringing the island, unnoticeable when the tall waves
passed them, but only a few inches under the surface at the troughs between
the waves (in hindsight obviously a set-up!!). Holy Crap! I can’t swim past that!
We put a plan together anyway, my friends and I, and when we were ready, the
dream island had been a prison all along. You know how dreams do that , right?
We all piled into Leif’s tiny car, and as we drove out through the two sets of
walls, I watched the gates go up in quick succession, only just barely staying
open long enough for us to get out.

We didn’t make it. There was a vicious rip current of busy highway ring-
ing the prison walls, and although we were going top speed when we shot out
through the gates, the spikes in the roadway didn’t stay retracted long enough
for us to get clear. The rear tires got completely shredded, and we scraped and
dragged to a stop on the shoulder of the highway, not even out of the shadow of
the prison walls. Just then, along whips some Mass-hole, driving in the break-
down lane. To avoid smashing into us, that car swerved back into the right lane
cutting off an eighteen-wheeler, which in turn swerved, then jackknifed and
skidded sideways across the entire road.

All the traffic smashed to a catastrophic halt, and neither my having
watched it all happen as in slow motion nor understanding exactly what had
gone wrong were of much help to either the battered and bleeding crash survi-
vors or the emergency personnel charged with cleaning up the wreckage.

Fast-forward to last week. It is spring of 2006 and I went walking with my
other friend around Providence, along a hill that for many years had overlooked
a disused asphalt lot, but which has more recently watched a multi-level parking
garage get built and then not used. What is it about a slope with a fence along
its crest that demands that decades of trash be strewn there? I think it is in the
nature of fences. This is the edge of somebody elses problem , the most laugh-
able and ugly implementation — transliteration even — of “not in my back yard.”
Anyway, machines had of late overturned swaths of this hillside, composed in
large part of layers and strata of rubbish, garbage, trash, some rotten leaves,
and a bunch of thrown-out crap; then the sun had come out and done what
only it can do to long-frozen plants. Wind-strewn seeds had blown everywhere ,
and the thing is, looking, you could just tell that the seeds didn’t care if they had
landed on a torn plastic bag at the end of a broken coat-hanger, or on the side of
a tiny over-turned and mildewed sneaker, or a damp patch of sandy clay. Tiny
green shoots of this and that were growing on literally everything.

This is the way it works, friend. The seeds will sprout when it is time,
whether they be caught in the crumbling mortar of an old mill astride a smelly
canal, tumble into the cloistered courtyard of some labyrinthine institution, or
scatter-sown over a freshly tilled field of earth lain fallow for several seasons.

Rob Coggeshall is an itinerant volunteer garbage man and former Fort Thunderite who
has always been allergic to limelight, preferring grapefruitlight. Until grapefruitlight is
invented he will probably continue trying to make ends meet (RISD student loans, old gas
bills, etc.) by doing carpentry around Providence and occasionally stitching words together
with a too big, but very sharp, needle.

118

sasha wiseman

When my roommate told me that The RISD Museum was putting on a
poster show, I figured she meant a typical show of the popular Fort Thun-
der screenprints. I was more disappointed than excited. I felt that the spirit
of the posters would be institutionalized, smothered, misinterpreted, over-
interpreted, etc. When she explained that the exhibition would include not
just the Fort posters, but every poster made in Providence between 1995
and 2005, 1 was incredulous.

“Every poster?”

“Every poster,” she affirmed, nodding.

We understood the enormity of the task at hand, and I wondered
whose job it would be to collect the thousands of pieces of paper that had
been stashed away in flat files, storage facilities and studios for the past
decade. It seemed like an excitingly impossible challenge, and the com-
mittee of artists organizing the show chose me to take it on.

Since I was fifteen years old, I had always covered one wall of ev-
ery bedroom I lived in with a rainbow explosion of show posters. It start-
ed when my father would rip down such announcements he would find
around RISD and bring them home, leaving them on my bed for me to
find when I came home from school. I would tack, staple, and duct-tape
them to my wall, and I was appalled at the way he carefully preserved his
own collection bought directly from the artists who made them around
town. I decided one day that his method of appreciating posters was
wasteful (why hoard them, tucked in between sheets of cardboard? Why
not experience them?), so I went down to his studio and stole my favor-
ites. Some of these were posters I had bought for him as birthday and
Christmas presents, but I felt strongly that they were being misused. By
this time it was becoming clear that the posters were gaining in status
and monetary value, but art collecting was too bourgeois for my taste, so
I made sure my posters were destroyed just enough to prevent me from
ever selling them or taking them too seriously. They were very important
to me, almost like pets— I wouldn’t let them become a commodity.

This attitude towards posters made me hesitant to work on the
Museum’s show, but the exhibition’s inclusiveness and artist-dictated cu-
ratorial decisions made me less skeptical. As the project has progressed,
I’ve become completely convinced of the historical importance of the
show. The way it’s being hung! Punk-rock photocopies tacked to a wall
next to elaborate screenprints, thousands of posters crammed into a few
rooms— it feels flippant and subversive, true to the original context.

I’ve been extremely lucky to have the opportunity to meet the doz-
ens of artists and collectors around town who have worked to make this
show possible. They’ve fed me, shared their stories, made me tea, given me
gifts, told bad jokes, and made me listen to the whole Judas Priest box set
in one sitting. I’ve learned more about contemporary printmaking from be-
ing invited into their homes, studios, and businesses than I ever could in a
classroom, and even though there were times when I would have rather
made out with a razor blade than measure the dimensions of one more
poster, this entire experience has been invaluable to me.

Sasha Wiseman grew up and currently resides in Providence, where she makes posters
and videos. She is a member of the Dirt Palace collective and the band Heart2Heart.

BOB

louse

Numeration III

Wall collage (detail), Fort Thunder, Olneyville (Providence), ca. 1997.
Photo by Hisham Akira Bharoocha

122

Demolition of Fort Thunder and Eagle Square flea market, Olneyville

» *

123

Lu Heintz
Pigeonfisher, 1997
Color screenprint, 20 x 14
Courtesy of Jenny Nichols

Dave Fischer
Deception, May 23, 2003
Laser jet print, 11x9
Courtesy of Mat Brinkman

124

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Xander Marro

Mouies Luith Live Soundtrax, April 19, 2002
Color screenprint, 22 x 17
Courtesy of the artist

125

HILLAHUS ATTIC

PTEMBER

TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 23
, cnicago HARMSTHYKER Virginia

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mass and more?,..

Mat Brinkman

Nautical Almanac + Harmstryker, September 19/23, 2003
Photocopy, 4x6
Courtesy of Erin Rosenthal

Leif Goldberg
Vaz, June 1, 1998
Color screenprint, 10 x 20
Courtesy of Brian Chippendale

126

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SATUKpay MAKCH /3 th *** k mmZ.

To AL+&

Mat Brinkman

Ceylon Mange, March 13, 2004
Color screenprint and photocopy, 11x9
Courtesy of Dave Lifrieri

127

128

109

rene morales

matt obert

In 1991, I dropped out of college to work full-time for the NicePaper, an in-
dependent weekly. We did the layout by hand with melted wax, razor blades,
and rubylith overlays for color separations. I learned screenprinting from Shep
Fairey, whose Giant-themed t-shirts were just starting to happen. Before 1994,
most gig posters around town were photocopies, sometimes on colored paper.
Screenprints were largely relegated to apparel design, like Shep’s stuff or Jim
Drapers Bullwinkle knockoffs. Designers who displayed their work in public
spaces mostly made stickers, like the “Paul’s Planet” campaign or “Andre the
Giant.” Historically, we were aware of the Mad Peck, but he wasn’t known for
wheat-pasting around town.

Then, in 1993, a Japanese noise band called Boredoms released their
U.S. debut, Soul Discharge. I was playing chess in Newspeak, the anarchist
bookstore on Richmond Street, when Guy Benoit of Von Ryan Express came
running in, waving a cassette tape over his head — he wanted everyone to hear
“52 Boredom.” It was some of the sickest shit I’d ever heard. A year later, Bore-
doms played at Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel. Von Ryan opened. The poster for
that show was a one-color screenprint by Mat Brinkman. That flyer was like
245 Words on a Bittersweet Exhibition the “shot heard round the world” for the Providence poster scene. It was a pur-

plish-gray color that you just couldn’t get from a photocopy, and it was covered
Maybe it was possible precisely because it seemed as if no one was with minutely detailed, vaguely intestinal squiggles. After that, there was sud-
watching. In the shadows of Lonelyville, where once no gallerist, mu- denly a fierce competition to make flyers more interesting — it was almost like
seum, art collector, record company, journalist, city official, or real es- an arms race.

tate speculator thought to look, several artists and musicians created I didn’t have access to a printshop until 1998, when Mark Pedini started

an environment of relative freedom. As a Brown student and East Sid- the one at AS220. At the time, the Kinko’s downtown offered spot toner in red
er, I was a fan and snitch from the outside. Accustomed to the very dif- or blue in addition to the usual black. My early flyers used this technique almost
ferent urban landscape of Miami, Providence and especially the West exclusively. Gasper bassist Steve Whirly designed some of these, and I did the
Side always seemed kind of spooky to me in an Edward Gorey sort color separations. Of these, the “Violent Anal Death” flyer is the first piece that
of way; but I loved those crumbling factories filled with rusty artifacts I got on the RISD Museum. Admittedly, I wheat-pasted it to the fire door out-
from the Industrial Revolution, and the cobwebby Victorian houses, side, but everybody starts somewhere.

the derelict Queen Annes with ornate fixtures. It was electrifying to By the time Fort Thunder started in 1995, the NicePaper was declar-

hear those cavernous spaces shot through with noise rock. ing bankruptcy. Unable to write my weekly column about independent music,

Art, unfortunately, is no match for the real estate business. I decided to try my hand at producing shows. I cast my lot with Jeff Rosenberg
Caught in the eddies of a housing market that’s on overdrive all over and Xander Marro at Brown’s Milhous co-op, and we started making flyers
the country, awash in gentrification and increasing rents, the “scene” with spraypaint stencils, linocuts, sewn-on patches, printing on tracing paper
(or whatever you want to call it) was already facing new boons and or dumpstered foam. We ended up sharing a studio called the Rough Area on
challenges when I left Providence a year ago. Some of the artists in Washington Street. Alec Thibodeau prints in there now, but pretty soon it’s
the show have also moved on to harness different energies in differ- going to be a fancy hotel. Milhous and Carberry co-ops have been vacant for
ent neighborhoods, perhaps in different cities. “The artist is a weed twelve years. Eagle Square and Harris Avenue are gone. People relocated to
that can survive in the cracks of a sidewalk,” wrote Arthur Miller. They Oak and Troy streets, only to face mass evictions. Bill Struever is buying every-
never needed Olneyville to make strong work, but for a while, it served thing in Olneyville. It’s warm and fuzzy and fun to celebrate this era, but if we
as silent partner in their creations. don’t watch out, we could lose everything we’re documenting here.

Rene Morales is Assistant Curator at the Miami Art Museum, where he has Matt Obert is the Editor In Chief of Providences premier sporadical publication, The Agenda,

worked on several projects, including Ana Mendieta: Earth Body and Miami in and he has been involved in local show promotion as a writer and graphic artist since the

Transition, which focused on the real-estate boom. Before moving to Miami, early 1990s (as the self described "Scene Maggot” of the Providence NicePaper ). Matt cur-

Morales lived in Providence for more than six years, two of which he spent as rently resides at AS220, where he has been, at various times: System Administrator, House

Curatorial Assistant at The RISD Museum. Last autumn. Cabinet Magazine pub- Manager, Volunteer Coordinator, Screenprinting Instructor and Unofficial Archivist,
fished the essay "Notes on Structure,” co-authored with physicist Erik Henriksen.

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